drift

A git diff pager that actually wants to be looked at.

drift takes the diff you already know and drops it into a real terminal UI: syntax highlighting, word-level change emphasis, split or unified views, a file-list modal and a live sidebar you can click and drag to resize, jump-to-hunk, in-file search, open-in-$EDITOR, and a live mode that repaints the moment your index or branch moves. Point it at a commit, your staging area, or your working tree, or just pipe a diff into it like any other pager.

No config needed to start. Themes, colors, and keys are all yours to bend later.

Install

cargo install drift-diff

That drops a drift binary on your PATH.

Use it

drift                     # working tree vs HEAD
drift -A                  # ...and untracked files too
drift --staged            # what's staged (alias: --cached)
drift HEAD~3              # a single commit
drift main..feature       # a range
drift -w                  # watch the repo and refresh on every change
git diff | drift          # pager mode: read a diff from stdin

Make it your default git pager for diffs:

git config --global pager.diff drift
git config --global pager.show drift

Some flags worth knowing:

Flag	What it does
-w, --watch	Refresh when the git index or refs change
-A, --all	Also show untracked files (working-tree view only)
-C, --directory DIR	Run as if started in DIR (worktrees, bare repos)
-c, --config FILE	Use a specific config file
--no-syntax	Turn off syntax highlighting for this run
-U, --context N	Lines of context around each change
--ignore-whitespace	Ignore whitespace-only changes
--diff-algorithm ALGO	myers, minimal, patience, or histogram
-- PATHSPEC...	Limit to paths, e.g. drift -- src/ docs/

Keys

Key	Action
j k / ↑ ↓	Move the cursor
h l / ← →	Scroll horizontally (for lines wider than the view)
0 $	Scroll to line start / end
d u / ^d ^u	Half page down / up
space f ^f / b ^b	Full page down / up
^e ^y	Scroll one line down / up
g G	Top / bottom
H M L	Cursor to screen top / middle / bottom
{ }	Previous / next hunk
[ ] / tab ⇧tab	Previous / next file
/	Search the current file (regex, smart-case)
n N	Next / previous match
s	Toggle split view
F	File list modal
B	Toggle the file sidebar
w	Toggle watch mode
V	Start / cancel a line selection; any motion key extends it
y	Copy the selection, or the cursor line when nothing is selected
Y	Copy the whole current file
enter	Expand folded context, or open the file at the cursor
v	Open the current file in $EDITOR
r	Refresh
?	Toggle the help footer
q	Quit

Mouse

drift is fully mouse-driven too:

• Click a file in the sidebar to jump straight to it in the diff.
• Click a file in the file modal to select it; the modal stays open until you click outside it (or press enter).
• Drag the sidebar's divider to resize it, live.
• In split view, drag the divider between the two panes to rebalance them.
• Click the ? help badge in the status bar to toggle the help footer.
• Drag across the diff to select text; it lands on your system clipboard (over SSH too, via OSC 52). In split view the selection stays within one pane, so you copy just the old or just the new side.
• Scroll wheel moves the page through the diff (the cursor stays put until it reaches an edge). Scroll the wheel left/right to pan wide lines horizontally.

Themes

Set theme = "..." in your config. Built in and ready:

• onedark, onelight (the defaults, picked by your terminal background)
• dracula
• gruvbox-dark, gruvbox-light
• nord
• solarized-dark, solarized-light
• catppuccin-mocha, catppuccin-latte
• tokyonight
• monokai
• ansi, which borrows your terminal's own 16 colors so drift matches whatever palette you already run. It leaves code text and word-diff emphasis alone, since 16 colors are too few to layer cleanly over diff colors.

Any syntect theme name works too (for example base16-ocean.dark), it just won't repaint the UI chrome to match.

The themes/ directory has a full, commented config for every built-in theme. Copy one and go:

mkdir -p ~/.config/drift
cp themes/dracula.toml ~/.config/drift/config.toml

Config

drift looks for a config file, in order, at:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/drift/config.{toml,yaml,yml,json}
• ~/.config/drift/config.{toml,yaml,yml,json}
• ~/.drift.toml

TOML, YAML, and JSON all work. The top-level knobs:

theme         = "onedark"   # any built-in or syntect theme name
syntax        = true        # highlight diff content
intraline     = true        # word-level change emphasis
line-numbers  = true        # old/new line-number gutter
tab-width     = 4
editor        = ""          # falls back to $VISUAL, then $EDITOR, then vi
sidebar       = "auto"      # "auto" (opens at width >= 150), "always", or "never"
sidebar-width = 30          # sidebar columns; drag its divider to resize live
sidebar-side  = "left"      # "left" or "right"

Colors come in two layers. [colors] is a named palette; [styles] maps UI components to a fg bg attrs... spec resolved against that palette. Every color token accepts a palette name, a literal #rrggbb, a 0-255 index, an ANSI color name, or default/none/- for the terminal's own color. See any file in themes/ for the full set with comments.

From git config

Anything you can set in a config file, you can set in git config under the drift section, which is handy for per-repo overrides. Colors and styles go in colors and styles subsections. Git forbids _ in a key, so a field like add_emph becomes add-emph:

git config drift.theme nord
git config drift.line-numbers false
git config drift.colors.add '#00ff00'
git config drift.colors.add-emph '#003300'
git config drift.styles.statusbar 'foreground surface bold'

Or in ~/.gitconfig directly:

[drift]
    theme = nord
    line-numbers = false
[drift "colors"]
    add = "#00ff00"
    add-emph = "#003300"
[drift "styles"]
    statusbar = "foreground surface bold"

For the full list of every setting, color, component style, and flag, see CONFIG.md.

License

MIT