diff-so-fancy — Good-Looking Diffs for git and plain text

What it is

diff-so-fancy is a command-line tool that transforms ugly unified diffs into clean, human-readable output. It strips redundant filename headers, removes leading +/- characters, and highlights word-level changes within each line. The result looks like a GitHub-style diff in your terminal.

The tool targets any developer who reads diffs in the terminal. It works as a drop-in replacement for git's default diff pager with zero learning curve.

How it saves time or tokens

Reading standard unified diffs requires mental effort to parse +/- prefixes, track which file you are in, and spot the actual changed words within long lines. diff-so-fancy eliminates this overhead by highlighting only what changed at the word level. Reviewing pull requests and debugging commits becomes faster.

How to use

1. Install diff-so-fancy via npm, brew, or your package manager.
2. Configure git to use it as the default pager.
3. Run git diff as usual — the output is automatically formatted.

# Install
npm install -g diff-so-fancy
# or
brew install diff-so-fancy

# Configure git to use diff-so-fancy
git config --global core.pager 'diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX'
git config --global interactive.diffFilter 'diff-so-fancy --patch'

# Now just use git diff normally
git diff
git log -p
git show HEAD

Example

# Standard git diff (hard to read):
- const MAX_RETRIES = 3;
+ const MAX_RETRIES = 5;

# diff-so-fancy output (word-level highlight):
# The line shows 'MAX_RETRIES = ' in normal color,
# '3' highlighted in red, '5' highlighted in green.
# No +/- prefixes. Clean file headers.

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Common pitfalls

• diff-so-fancy does not work well with git add -p (interactive staging) unless you also set interactive.diffFilter; without it, the patch mode shows raw diffs.
• Some terminal color schemes make the highlights hard to see; adjust diff-so-fancy's color settings or switch to a dark terminal theme.
• Piping diff-so-fancy output to other tools strips the ANSI colors; use --color=always if you need to pipe through grep or less.