GitHub style split diffs with syntax highlighting in your terminal.

Demo 1 | Demo 2

This currently requires node version 12 or newer to run.

npm install -g git-split-diffs

git config --global core.pager "git-split-diffs --color | less -RFX"

npm install git-split-diffs

git config core.pager "npx git-split-diffs --color | less -RFX"

git diff | git-split-diffs --color | less -RFX

By default, lines are wrapped to fit in the screen. If you prefer to truncate them, update the wrap-lines setting:

git config split-diffs.wrap-lines false

By default, salient changes within lines are also highlighted:

You can disable this with the highlight-line-changes setting:

git config split-diffs.highlight-line-changes false

Syntax highlighting is supported via shiki, which uses the same grammars and themes as vscode. Each theme specifies a default syntax highlighting theme to use, which can be overridden by:

git config split-diffs.syntax-highlighting-theme <name>

The supported syntax highlighting themes are listed at https://github.com/shikijs/shiki/blob/v0.9.3/docs/themes.md

You can disable syntax highlighting by setting the name to empty:

git config split-diffs.syntax-highlighting-theme ''

Split diffs can be hard to read on narrow terminals, so we revert to unified diffs if we cannot fit two lines of min-line-width on screen. This value is configurable:

git config split-diffs.min-line-width 40

This defaults to 80, so screens below 160 characters will display unified diffs. Set it to 0 to always show split diffs.

You can pick between several themes:

Based on https://www.nordtheme.com/

git config split-diffs.theme-name arctic

This is the default theme.

git config split-diffs.theme-name dark

git config split-diffs.theme-name light

git config split-diffs.theme-name github-dark-dim

git config split-diffs.theme-name github-light

As seen on https://github.com/altercation/solarized

git config split-diffs.theme-name solarized-dark

git config split-diffs.theme-name solarized-light

git config split-diffs.theme-name monochrome-dark

git config split-diffs.theme-name monochrome-light

Tested by measuring the time it took to pipe the output git log -p to /dev/null via git-split-diffs with the default theme:

¹ shikijs/shiki#151 improves this to 333ms/kloc

See #narrow-terminals

Text coloring is implemented using Chalk which supports various levels of color. If Chalk is producing fewer colors than your terminal supports, try overriding Chalk's detection using a variation of the --color flag, e.g. --color=16m for true color. See Chalk's documentation or this useful gist on terminal support if issues persist.

• diff-so-fancy for showing what's possible
• shikijs for making it easy to do high quality syntax highlighting
• chalk for making it easy to do terminal styling reliably
• delta which approaches the same problem in Rust