Awesome Git Diffs with Delta, fzf and a Little Shell Scripting

Spotting differences in code is an important part of what we do, Delta is by far the best CLI diff tool I ever used.

Quick Jump:

Want to watch the video to see how it works? It’s on YouTube.

Around a year before writing this post I tricked out git to show its diffs with delta and created a little gd

(git diff) script to make it easier to see diffs when doing PR reviews. It’s all up in my dotfiles.

Then I forgot to write a blog post about it because I guess internally I thought to myself “of course I wrote a post about this already, I use this almost every day”. Oops!

This is one of those posts where it’ll be easier for the both of us to watch the demo video to see how it works. My dotfiles have all of the code. If you already know you want it without watching that’s cool too, here’s some of the files of interest in text form.

# System Dependencies

If you plan to use delta, you’ll need to install it.

If you’re using my dotfiles it automatically handles installing everything for you on Arch Linux, Debian, Ubuntu and macOS. If not, you can find delta using whatever package manager is available on your OS. It’s the git-delta

package in most.

If you want to use the gd

script you’ll need to have fzf installed. Again, my dotfiles take care of installing this for you too. I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since I started using fzf. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

# Shell Config

You’ll likely want to set export DELTA_FEATURES="diff-so-fancy"

in your shell’s profile to get the improved (IMO) look of diffs by default. This gives you great looking diffs where you can see both character and word changes with dual tone colors (light and dark green, etc.).

# Git Integration

With only a tiny bit of git configuration, these git commands will start using Delta:

git show

git diff

git add -p

git blame

The above link shows how to configure your .gitconfig

for this.

# Script

If you want to use the delta + fzf powered gd script, it’ll let you view git diffs with a custom fzf menu so you can quickly jump between files, it even supports an optional --side

flag if you want side by side diffs:

• Run gd

in a git repo to view agit diff

• Run gd main..

in a git repo to compare the checked out branch vs main- I use this all the time for reviewing PRs, it’s invaluable!

The gd

script passes the args directly over to git diff

so commands like gd --staged

or comparing your local branch with a remote “just works”. No new API to learn!

# ripgrep Support

You can use rg --json <search_pattern> | delta

to have matches get highlighted with delta instead of rg’s default. I don’t use this a lot but wanted to include it because it’s neat.

The video below shows how all of these commands work.

BONUS: Since I recorded this video I also created a separate script for browsing and searching git log

, it’s up in my dotfiles, I’ll make a future post about this at some point!

# Demo Video

Timestamps

• 0:22 – Character diffs are easy to spot
• 0:46 – The custom gd TUI with fzf
• 2:22 – Using normal git diff, add, blame and show commands
• 4:24 – Configuring git to use delta
• 5:28 – Configure Delta to use fancy diffs
• 6:42 – Installing Delta
• 7:27 – The gd TUI script
• 8:45 – Feeding rigrep’s output into delta

How do you view diffs? Let me know below.