Improved Git Diffs with Delta, Fzf and a Little Shell Scripting

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/awesome-git-diffs-with-delta-fzf-and-a-little-shell-scripting

by nickjj • 4 months ago

175 41 4 months ago

linsomniac• 4 months ago

I had been using delta for around a year and liked it, but still found some of the diffs I was looking a bit hard to read. A few weeks ago after a discussion on HN I tried difftastic, and have become a fan. You might want to consider it if you go down this rabbit hole. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

TJTorola• 4 months ago

Came here to say this, difftastic is great as long as you are working in a language where it understands the language tree (most languages). Getting away from diffs being focused on line changes to diffs that understand the actual language makes so much sense once you start to use it.

nh22• 4 months ago

Still waiting for Delta + Difftastic integration:

https://github.com/dandavison/delta/issues/535

kennykartman• 4 months ago

Be careful with difftastic, because it has at least one severe bug involving python that has been present for a long time: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/issues/587

nchmy• 4 months ago

Came to say this as well. Started with delta, then found difftastic.

Even better is using it via jjui, a fantastic TUI for jj vcs

TacticalCoder• 4 months ago

https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

ah, it's using tree-sitter to not bother reporting changes that have no effect.

That's very nice!

Now, of course, the biggest issue is that our DVCes still are from the paleolitic era and store source code as non-structured text files instead of trees, so we need to the proper thing "outside" the DVCS (which is using tools like diffstatic / tree-sitter: tools that have seen the light).

It's basically the old "tabs vs space" and "tabs = how many spaces?" and "bracket on the same line or not" discussions all over again. I'm pretty sure I've got comment from 15 years ago saying that in a proper world this shouldn't even be a concern because this should purely be a client-side concern, on the dev's machine. And that the DVCS should have a specific representation, not opened for discussion (a code formatter for example, but ideally just the source code already as a tree). And then no more bitchin' about tabs vs space, about how many spaces is a tab worth, on which line brackets should go, etc.

Don't get me wrong: it's great that people are doing the right thing. But it's still a kludge that's needed because the underlying tool were made by us and for us cavemen and really could have been oh so much better.

skydhash2• 4 months ago

You forgot that while expression can be trees, statements are an ordered set. And most statements fits inside one line. So a diff that relies on lines gives enough information.

Also git can be made to ignore whitespace changes (a source of noise) and can refine a hunk to highlight what has changed. That’s plenty enough for most people.

baumy2• 4 months ago

As someone who's used vim + a shell as my IDE since the start of my time using computers, it's been really awesome (and occasional eye-roll inducing...) watching people discover all these tools now that claude code is sending them into the terminal.

A lot of posts like this are making it to the front page of HN now that new people are exploring this world for the first time. That's great, the more the merrier, but gets a bit frustrating when a post title is written as if it's discovered some new awesome development tool or methodology, and it's just something people have been doing for years or even decades. This post isn't that big of an offender, but I'm thinking more of stuff like this [0] that it reminded me of.

I should try to be less grumpy about it, but I hope people also try to recognize how often these "new" tools they've been discovering have been routinely used long before LLMs. Maybe I'm just hitting my get-off-my-lawn stage, but it's a bit jarring to come to hacker news and see upvoted posts that are just "look, I can color the diffs in my terminal!". I'm glad this person discovered it, but I thought that was table stakes for the community here.

[0] https://x.com/dani_avila7/article/2023151176758268349

MeetingsBrowser6• 4 months ago

Having used both terminal and GUI based development environments, the good GUI environments blow terminal based workflows out of the water.

There are pros and cons to each. Vim can do some neat things, but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.

The terminal tools are getting popular because people don’t need to do development. Claude is doing the development task. People just need to quickly review code in terminal.

ab71e5• 4 months ago

Why would you say GUI based workflows are better (ignoring LLMs for now)? I would maybe give you debugging with breakpoints but for anything else I love my neovim with tmux setup

rileymat23• 4 months ago

but GUI based IDEs are generally useful and easier to use out of the box for development.

This is true, they are much better for discovery and affordance, but as you progress with your tooling and tool usage there is a much higher ceiling on your productivity with other tools and their composability. In my opinion, not putting effort into learning tools ultimately holds a lot of people back from their potential.

backscratches2• 4 months ago

Lol terminal is better for everything except maybe the one case you mentioned: first time use feature discovery, and that's debatable

baumy2• 4 months ago

I completely disagree. Terminal workflows are superior in a number of ways. Most important to me are that they are more composable and more customizable. The learning curve is tougher, but the "skill ceiling" on them is higher. The ease and speed with which somebody comfortable in their terminal based environment will navigate through the tasks they need to do will always exceed what is even possible in a GUI.

I would say that GUIs are superior for a few specific use cases, but otherwise sub par. Step through debugging comes to mind as a good GUI use case, but even that I'm not sure if it's because a GUI is inherently better, or making a terminal based debugger is harder and so nobody has made a good one yet.

nickjj• 4 months ago

watching people discover all these tools now that claude code is sending them into the terminal.

Hi, I'm the author of the post.

I don't like replying to comments like this but I think it's important because of how "invasive" LLMs have become and how they might jade your opinion (not you specifically, but everyone) on any type of output such as blog posts, videos, code, etc..

I wrote about this because I've done contract work for lots of companies, spoken with lots of developers and every time they see the output of Delta they are like "how did you make your git diffs look so cool?", so I thought it was worth sharing because there's lots of folks out there who might not know about it.

By the way, this concept of having a terminal based workflow is something I've openly been using, sharing and writing about for around a decade. There's 500+ posts and videos on my site covering a ton of different topics.

You're more than welcome to explore any of the 70+ open source projects I maintain https://github.com/nickjj?tab=repositories, with git histories going back well before LLMs existed. Thousands upon thousands of human written lines of shell scripts, Python scripts, Docker set ups, etc.. Every readme file was written by hand and 99.999% of current day code is by hand too. I've been playing with AI to learn new languages like Lua to solve specific problems but I end up rewriting most of that code afterwards. You can view comments I've made on HN in the past in how I feel about LLM code haha.

godelski• 4 months ago

I'm a long time vim user and terminally terminal as well. I also feel very mixed

On one hand I'm really glad more people are coming over. There's been an explosion in TUIs and it's helping that people understand how important UX and visual design is.

On the order hand I'm annoyed as things move from unix philosophy and it feels like people are just trying to make terminals GUIs. The beauty of the CLI is its power. I'll give up the UI because it is so powerful. The learning curve is steeper but it's not that bad once you get used to it. And since so many people go through the same experience there's a shared language across many different tools.

Maybe an obvious example of that is how people conflate "vim mode" with using hjkl for movement. Even `set -o vi` in bash is more rich of an experience than what many people think "vim mode" should mean, at least to a vim user. But lots of that shared unix language is getting lost and I'm not a fan of those tools

diath• 4 months ago

I had to give up on diff-so-fancy because it would break a lot when used with `git diff --patch` but this post just reminded me of the issue and it turns out that it has recently been fixed, so I may give it another go.

https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy/issues/498

jeninho• 4 months ago

Been using delta for a while now, the side by side mode alone was worth the switch. Pair it with fzf and you can browse commits interactively which is a lifesaver on repos with messy history.

rs5458373• 4 months ago

We've been building an open source tool called sem (https://github.com/ataraxy-labs/sem) that takes this one level further: entity-level diffs instead of AST-level.

Instead of showing you which syntax nodes changed, it shows you which functions, classes, and methods changed, classifies the change (text-only, syntax, functional), and walks a dependency graph to tell you the blast radius.

The delta + difftastic integration problem in that issue is interesting because sem already has the pieces both sides need, before/after content with full context for every changed entity, plus structured JSON output. The blocker in #535 is that difftastic's JSON doesn't include surrounding context. sem's output includes complete entity bodies by default.

Would love to collaborate on a common interchange format if anyone from the delta or difftastic projects is interested. Entity-level granularity sits naturally above AST-level diffs and below file-level diffs, and having a standard way to represent "what changed and what depends on it" would be useful for the whole ecosystem.

esafak• 4 months ago

It tells you the function changed but not how; you still need line-level diffs.

rs5458373• 4 months ago

Right, sem gives you both. sem diff --verbose shows the full before/after body of each changed entity. The entity-level view tells you what changed and what's affected. The line-level detail is still there when you need it.

dominotw• 4 months ago

can diffs be piped through an llm to give you something higher level but still tie it back to to changes

rs5458373• 4 months ago

You can, but it's slow, expensive, and hallucinates. An LLM looking at a raw diff might miss a renamed function or invent a dependency that doesn't exist. sem does it structurally: parses both sides with tree-sitter, computes structural hashes, walks the real dependency graph. If you want to layer an LLM on top for summarization, you're feeding it 10 entities instead of 500 lines of unified diff.

good-idea• 4 months ago

Related and a step beyond just viewing diffs - has anyone found a good TUI solution for a local equivalent of doing GitHub PR reviews?

I love the simplicity of using existing tools in this post. It would be nice to have something similar that would allow for adding online comment threads on a diff, and output it to a simple markdown file. Of course, I'm thinking about a local agent workflow here.

whinvik• 4 months ago

Haven't used it but have seen some online recommendations for gh-dash. https://github.com/dlvhdr/gh-dash

jfyne• 4 months ago

I wrote myself https://github.com/jfyne/meatcheck to do this. We use it with Claude to review markdown files and do reviews of changes.

Claude spawns the process, it pops open a browser tab. You review what is there and can leave line by line feedback. You click finish and your comments go to stdout for Claude to read.

We ask Claude to group changes and order them by importance to make reviews easier for us.

dex01• 4 months ago

How about using the already provided git provided diff-highlight tool ?

git config core.pager /usr/share/git/diff-highlight/diff-highlight

Improved Git Diffs with Delta, Fzf and a Little Shell Scripting

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