How to colorize diff on the command line

Question

When I have a diff, how can I colorize it so that it looks good?

I want it for the command line, so please no GUI solutions.

Answer 1

Man pages for diff suggest no solution for colorization from within itself. Please consider using colordiff. It's a wrapper around diff that produces the same output as diff, except that it augments the output using colored syntax highlighting to increase readability:

diff old new | colordiff 

or just:

colordiff old new 

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Installation:

• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install colordiff
• OS X: brew install colordiff or port install colordiff