Git Tip of the Day – viewing diffs graphically with meld

I got tired of viewing diffs in a terminal with red and green text. I wanted to see diffs more comfortably, with syntax highlighting, segment highlighting (not just full lines), easy scrolling, searching, switching between files. I wanted to have something like Phabricator diff, Netbeans diff or PyCharm diff. So I finally spent 20 minutes (why do most annoyances take you 20 minutes to solve, but you delay them for years?) and found out that git now has a cool new command, git difftool. And it supports meld, a great graphical comparison program.

Let’s compare this:

git diff in gnome-terminal

With this:

meld diff overview

meld file diff

Awesome, right?!! All you need to do is this:

$ git difftool --tool=meld -d <diffspec>

Option -d makes it work in directory mode, which works much better with meld. Of course this is too long to type every time, to let’s remember meld as the default diff tool, and even make an alias for it:

$ git config --global diff.tool meld
$ git config --global alias.dt 'difftool -d'

(Also, don’t forget to enable syntax highlighting in meld preferences, it was disabled for me for some reason.)

And now, voila:

$ git dt master..develop

I’m very happy about the increased readability and productivity.