CVS style diffs in git

Question

Is there any way to make the output format of git diffs like cvs style diffs? I find git diffs to be less readable. Also, the git diffs appearing in more are annoying - how can I disable this?

Answer 1

git diff uses the "universal" format, diff -u, by default. cvs diff uses the older standard diff format (deleted lines marked with <, added lines marked with >, no context around each difference).

You can get a "context diff" using git diff -c, or git diff -C5, for example, to get 5 lines of context rather than the default 3.

diff --normal (at least if you're using GNU diffutils) will produce an old-style diff, but git diff doesn't seem to recognize the --normal option.

Personally, I find context diffs much more readable than old-style diffs, so I've never found the need to use old-style diffs with git diff. Try git diff -c (along with haggai_e's suggestion to disable the pager).

If you really want the old-style diffs (<, >, no context), there's probably a way to do it.

EDIT :

If git diff doesn't do what you want, you can extract copies of the revisions of the file and use whatever diff tool you like on them. My own get-versions tool can extract multiple versions of a file from git (or from RCS or CVS).

And here's another solution, though it's a bit more complicated. As an example, I've cloned the git repo for git itself. If I want to compare two successive versions of the top-level README file, I can do this:

$ diff --normal <(git show 779d7e93773a0dcf918dc77023511fdc68161bd8:README) \
                <(git show 71ce415dc088f19a0b8d6c8567dfdd6d851842b2:README)
24,26c24,25
< compatible with the GPLv2).
< It was originally written by Linus Torvalds with help of a group of
< hackers around the net. It is currently maintained by Junio C Hamano.
---
> compatible with the GPLv2). It was originally written by Linus
> Torvalds with help of a group of hackers around the net.
$ 

It would be easy enough to wrap this in a small script.

Note that the file path following the : (README in the above example) is relative to the root of the repository, not to the current directory. You can precede the name with ./ to make to make it relative to the current directory. (The latter might not work with some older versions of git.)