Re: Colors for diff

[Dan Hipschman]

On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 05:15:54PM +0100, Fred . wrote:
> Hi
> I use the diff tool like "diff file1.c file2.c"
> But its just plain, so its a bit hard to read.
> I would suggest to have the output colored, so that it more easily be read.

  sudo apt-get install colordiff

Or Google for it.  The nice thing about it is that it's both a wrapper
and a filter, so both

  colordiff file1.c file2.c

and

  git-diff | colordiff

etc., work.  Since there is a tool for this that can be separated from
diff itself, it is very unlikely it will be integrated into diff.  The
difference between this and ls or grep is that you cannot color the
output of those programs without the information they have at runtime.
E.g., it's not possible to know which name was a directory from a simple
list, but with diff output it is.