How to Use Your Favorite Diff Tool in Git

(photo grabbed from internet)

In a team that has more than 1 developer working on the same project, comparing source codes can be an everyday task. Often times,we need to know the difference between two version of files in a branch or on different branch. Git gave use a bare bones tool right for the job, the git diff. But as I have mentioned, its a bare bones approach. When dealing with lenghty files with multiple differences you will always prefer your go to diff tool e.g. winmerge, kdiff etc. Luckily, GiHub supports this scenario using git difftool.

In this post, we are configuring the git system to use KDiff as the diff tool. You can go ahead and use other tool if you want too.

What do we need?

• Git , of course.
• KDiff

What do we need to do?

We only need to modify our .gitconfig file to include thwe configuration for the diff tool. If you dont have any diff tool installed, you need to install one or just stick with git diff.

git diff main dev

For those interested in using KDiff, the free software can be dowloaded at their site. Don’t you just love visiting retro website like sourceforge :)

Open your .getconfig and add the following settings. For Windows user it probably sit in your users folder (e.g. C:\Users[username]). Note that the example setting is for Windows.

[diff]
    guitool = kdiff3
[difftool "kdiff3"]
    path = C:/Program Files/KDiff3/kdiff3.exe
    trustExitCode = false

Once this is setup, we can now use KDiff3 as our diff tool when using git.

git difftool main dev

This will launch KDiff3 where you can view differences as you always has been.

Notice that git will prompt you everytime before it opens a file with differences.

Or, you can specify the file yu want to compare

 git difftool main dev  -- .\daily-exercises\example1-main\Program.cs

Its a good thing git allows us to use our favorite tools for file diff operations. Otherwise, users who are more accustomed to GUI tools such as KDiff3 may have a hard time loving the system.