You can use \cat to prevent alias expansion.

This is what KDevelop called Semantic Highghting (as opposed to Syntax Highlighting). I think it was there earlier than this, but the earliest post I can find describing it is from 2009: https://zwabel.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/c-ide-evolution-from...

The author of that post wrote "difftastic", which is "a structural diff that understands syntax" using treesitter.

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

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

Totally agree, at first it looked alien to me but I've grown used to and prefer this way of highlighting. Personally I use color-identifiers-mode[0] for Emacs.

[0] https://github.com/ankurdave/color-identifiers-mode

We are pretty good at picking out variable names too... Especially if the grammar itself is highlighted since we then know exactly where to look / where not to look.

I'm not convinced of the argument, but still a bit curious.

I sometimes highlight a variable to follow it and make sure I don't miss an instance of it, so that I totally get. But not sure we have enough colors and contrast to make sense to follow many variables without cluttering everything up. A compromise might be to manually color up to 3 or something variables.

... but the cases where that helps may be a sign that the code isn't very readable to begin with (helping with messy codebases is a proper usecase though!).

How do I enable this by default (in .gitconfig)?

> It's unclear to me why this is not the default

It's literally in the PR you mention:

syntax-highlighting very long lines (e.g. minified .js) will be very slow if they are not truncated

  git config --global diff.noprefix true

You are probably missing a $ before COLUMNS and export before setting DELTA_FEATURES

Difftastic and Delta work not only in bare terminals. Both are supported by Magit in Emacs, both are also supported by Lazygit.

I've been using difftastic for a while. How do you use both together?

you might like diffr (https://github.com/mookid/diffr) (disclaimer: my project)

had the same impression. never really found bare git diff to be a problem.

Hi, delta now automatically detects whether the terminal background is light or dark and selects a theme accordingly. (This is due to the nice work of contributor bash: https://github.com/bash/terminal-colorsaurus)

It will use whatever `bat` theme is set. Bat itself doesn't do system theme detection, but it's easy enough to do in a script - I have one that gets called when my system theme changes where I set themes for various programs. Looks like this for dark mode:

    #!/usr/bin/fish
    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme "Adwaita-dark"
    fish_config theme choose "ayu Mirage"
    yes | fish_config theme save
    echo "--theme=OneHalfDark" > ~/.config/bat/config
    kitten themes --reload-in=all "Ayu Mirage"

Same for me. I don't know, delta seems more like a chaos I can't make sense of than default git diffs

https://dandavison.github.io/delta/tips-and-tricks/export-to...

Try webdiff (I’m the author) https://pypi.org/project/webdiff/

xfce4-terminal supports "Copy as HTML" for stuff like this.

I created diff-so-fancy and I migrated to Delta a few years back.

Same here, to be honest I never gave much thought to seeking alternatives, but this one looks really nice, especially having the line numbers and similar layout to GitHub diffs

Delta has a diff-so-fancy mode, so could be a nice way to transition.

I use both.

If you are getting to check out bat, you might want to check,

- rg (ripgrep): A grep replacement

- sk (skim): A grep/fzf/fzy replacement

- fd: A find replacement that's .gitignore+.ignore aware.

- eza: A replacement for ls that's git aware

- broot: A TUI file finder to browse large directories

- yazi: A file manager (I haven't used this one too much)

sk+rg + gawk in action to find files matching some text,

            sk \
              --ansi \
              --interactive \
              --cmd 'rg --color=always --line-number "{}"' --preview 'bat --color=always $(echo {} | gawk -F: "{print \$1}") --highlight-line $(echo {} | gawk -F: "{print \$2}")' \
            | gawk \
                -F: \
                '{print $1}'

bat is great. I end up doing

curl … | prettier --parser html | bat

to get not-ugly HTML output from curl.

Delta can show in the terminal a diff that looks like the GitHub one. You can compare side by side what was changed. It also highlight with more strength what changed inside the line. I installed it once, and never came back to the standard diff output.

If Delta doesn't work like you expected and you want a standard diff output temporarily, no problem, you can run Git with

git -c core.pager=less

Note also that if you redirect the Git output, Git is smart enough to not call the pager (in this case, Delta)

This is a case of personal taste. My only complaint about Delta is its name. Delta is already a concept in Git, and every time that I need to search about it is a pain... I search directly by "dandavision delta"

Different use case. This is just a diff pager, it's not supposed to help you solve complicated 3 way merges.

On a separate tangent - I haven't needed to do a gnarly merge in years it seems like. I feel like the dev community has collectively gotten better at git/SCM in general. Maybe I was super junior before but it's just not a problem I seem to face in daily software dev anymore.

The price, is infinity times cheaper. Also terminal based means it can run on remote machines or local.

Does Araxis Merge work in the terminal on Linux?