git-diff-syntax-highlight

Utilities to include syntax highlighting in the terminal, for git diffs and other commands. This is a patched version of https://gist.github.com/skanev/0eeb943e3111a1df55fd which fixes rare bugs I've encountered in that gist. It also patches the syntax highlighting to match my personal preferences.

This is configured to highlight ruby, C, C++, Clojure, CSS, ERB, Go, Java, JavaScript, JSON, PHP, Lua, Python, SASS, SCSS, SQL, XML, and YAML files.

Scripts

• git-diff-syntax-highlight.rb - A syntax highlighter for git diffs.
• colorless - Like less filename.extension, but with syntax highlighting.
• coderay_colorize - Like cat filename.extension, but with syntax highlighting.

Known Issues

• RVM can break this when switching to a different ruby version.
• Highlighting using background colors is poorly handled and result in code that are hard to read. This may be fixable by ensuring some minimum contrast when generating color codes.
• At the time of writing, there is no support for Markdown in coderay, which this depends on

Dependencies

This requires that term-ansicolor and coderay be installed, and that ruby be set up.

gem install --user term-ansicolor coderay

Colorizing Git diffs

Add the following to .gitconfig.

The simple-log, simple-diff, and simple-show aliases are provided because syntax highlighting is slow for projects with long histories, and because changes in rvm paths can break diffs completely.

[core]
    pager = /path/to/git-diff-syntax-highlight.rb --highlight | less -F -X
    # The -F -X is optional.
    # In addition to --highlight, --coderay-colors may be used to change the syntax highlighting.

The git-simple-* scripts are found in ./bin. After adding those to a directory the shell's $PATH, you probably also want to create aliases for the original diffs.

[alias]
	simple-log = !git-simple-log
	simple-diff = !git-simple-diff
	simple-show = !git-simple-show

Similar Projects

https://github.com/dandavison/delta is a similar project written in Rust, with more themes and configuration options.

https://github.com/sharkdp/bat is similar to the colorless script this provides, with more themes.

https://github.com/trishume/syntect is the library those Rust projects use. I'd expect it to have faster startup times and better performance on long diffs.