colordiff — a tool to colorize diff output
Posted by admin on May 10th, 2008 
Email This Post
colordiff makes use of ANSI colours and as such will only work when ANSI colours can be used - typical examples are xterms and Eterms, as well as console sessions.
colordiff has been tested on various flavours of Linux and under OpenBSD, but should be broadly portable to other systems.
Install colordiff in Ubuntu
sudo aptitude install colordiff
This will complete the installation.
Using colordiff
colordiff Syntax
colordiff [diff options] {file1} {file2}
colordiff Examples
Use colordiff wherever you would normally use diff, or pipe output to colordiff:
$ colordiff file1 file2
$ diff -u file1 file2 | colordiff
You can pipe the output to ‘less’, using the ‘-R’ option (some systems or terminal types may get better results using ‘-r’ instead), which keeps the colour escape sequences, otherwise displayed incorrectly or discarded by ‘less’:
$ diff -u file1 file2 | colordiff | less -R
If you have wdiff installed, colordiff will correctly colourise the added and removed text, provided that the ‘-n’ option is given to wdiff:
$ wdiff -n file1 file2 | colordiff
You may find it useful to make diff automatically call colordiff. Add the following line to ~/.bashrc (or equivalent):
alias diff=colordiff
Any options passed to colordiff are passed through to diff.
Alternatively, a construct such as ‘cvs diff SOMETHING | colordiff’ can be included in ~/.bashrc as follows:
function cvsdiff () { cvs diff $@ | colordiff; }
Or, combining the idea above using ‘less’:
function cvsdiff () { cvs diff $@ | colordiff |less -R; }
Note that the function name, cvsdiff, can be customized.
Configuration files
/etc/colordiffrc - Central configuration file. User-specific settings can be enabled by copying this file to ~/.colordiffrc and making the appropriate changes.
colordiffrc-lightbg - Alternate configuration template for use with terminals having light backgrounds. Copy this to /etc/colordiffrc or ~/.colordiffrc and customize.
If you want to be notified the next time we write something please subscribe to our RSS feed.Thanks for Visiting!