How to have git_diff look the same as terminal output

[liamhennebury]

Currently when I use git diff from the terminal I see:

I want the same experience when using the git_diff picker. I've tried a few things but here is what I see. It seems that the colors are stripped before sending it to the diff-highlight pager command (for reference: git/2.51.2/share/git-core/contrib/diff-highlight/diff-highlight):

Interestingly if I use git_log I do see colour.

Ideally using diff = { style = "terminal" } would be enough to get the same experience as command line, I shouldn't need to specify cmd. Also when I don't add cmd it falls back to the fancy version.

[drowning-cat]

[folke]

Sorry, but that's not correct at all. Don't change that preview, since now you're simply seeing something else entirely. The git_diff picker runs git diff, parses the chunks and shows the chunks in the preview.

By setting preview to git_diff, you're no longer showing the chunk, but literally git diff of that file, which is a totally different thing!

[liamhennebury]

I would expect for delta or any pager since you configure it as your pager in ~/.gitconfig that it should just call git diff and pass through the results unimpeded. Then you would get whatever you see on the command line without needing extra configuration.

[folke]

That's just not what the git diff picker does!

How do you think I could parse and present git diff output in such a way, if it would be rendered by a git pager??

Again, the preview is literally a diff. You can use delta or anything else to render that diff.

Git doesn't provide a pager for random diffs

[folke]

@drowning-cat please remove that code. It will lead to issues for other people

[drowning-cat]

Oops, sorry 😴

[gmr458]

I am having this problem since the version 2.29.0, I use difftastic (https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/), I have this option in my git config:

[diff]
	external = difft

Example of how the output looks in the terminal:

This is how it looks using v2.28.0 with this config:

require('snacks').setup {
    --- other config
    picker = {
        previewers = {
            git = {
                native = true,
            },
        },
    },
    --- other config
}

I tried the latest version and tested all 3 possible values for picker.previewers.diff.style and none of them worked for me.

[drowning-cat]

Then use git_status instead of git_diff. If you check the documentation again, you’ll see that setting previewers.diff.style = "terminal" will show the git pager defined in your .gitconfig in the preview for all git commands except git_diff. The cmd option applies only to the git_diff picker and is used to pipe raw, uncolored hunks into the command you provide (delta by default). If that command doesn’t handle this type of input, then forget it—don’t try to be clever and drop git diff in there.

[gmr458]

If you check the documentation again, you’ll see that setting previewers.diff.style = "terminal" will show the git pager defined in your .gitconfig in the preview for all git commands except git_diff.

My config:

After executing Snacks.picker.git_status() this is what I get, is not using difftastic.

This is how it should look:

[drowning-cat]

I don't know 🤷‍♂️ I give up trying to understand. External programs are not supported by git_diff preview.

--no-ext-diff

snacks.nvim/lua/snacks/picker/preview.lua

Line 314 in 3c5c23b

local cmd, terminal = git(ctx, "diff", "--no-ext-diff")

[gmr458]

I removed that flag and now it works

[folke]

ok, that "--no-ext-diff" shouldn't have been there. Just removed that.

previewers = {
    diff = {
        style = 'terminal',
        cmd = { 'git', '-c', 'diff.external=difft', 'diff' },
    },
},

That is obviously completely wrong. cmd should be a cli tool that takes a diff as stdin and renders it in a terminal.
If you add what you have there, you will basically never render the diffs at all!

Apart from that, I don't think you actually want git_diff. The git_status picker is what you want.
That one will use git directly and as such can show difftastic output (with that fix obviously).