TIL: diff-so-fancy; and some funky git config

#git #diff #shell

I just discovered diff-so-fancy, and very nice it is too. I immediately added it to my standard git config, which is semi-automatically installed on every machine I use. However, I've not (yet) installed diff-so-fancy on all the machines I use, and for those platforms for which it's not packaged I probably won't bother installing it from source.

But if I just follow the author's instructions which amount to adding this to my ~/.gitconfig:

[core]
    pager = "diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX"

then git diff will break:

$ git diff HEAD^
diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX: diff-so-fancy: command not found

but there's an easy fix! Whatever is in pager is just shell code, so this works:

[core]
    pager = "if [ ! -z \"$(which diff-so-fancy)\" ]; then diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX; else less; fi"

The output from git diff is piped into that little script. If diff-so-fancy is installed (ie if "$(which diff-so-fancy)" is not zero-length) then it does exactly what diff-so-fancy's author suggests. Otherwise, if diff-so-fancy isn't installed, just run less.

Build apps, not infrastructure.

Dealing with servers, hardware, and infrastructure can take up your valuable time. Discover the benefits of Heroku, the PaaS of choice for developers since 2007.

Visit Site