Git: remove leading plus/minus from lines in diff

Question

My question is rather simple, though I have had no luck finding an answer.

I'd like to remove the leading plus/minus symbols from each line in git diff. Before you ask why I wish to do this, allow me to outline my reasons:

1. Lines that are exactly 80 chars will overflow by a single character, which just looks plain awkward
2. The coloring is enough for me to distinguish between additions/deletions
3. I'd prefer to keep my Terminal's window width at 80 chars (as opposed to an arbitrary 81 chars) to maintain consistency with everything else I do in my Terminal (outside of git)

Is there some config option for doing this? If not, how can I do this in a way that still allows me to page through my diff less-style?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

One option is to use sed to remove the undesired character from diff, while preserving the color:

git diff --color | sed -r "s/^([^-+ ]*)[-+ ]/\\1/" | less -r

(Note that you need to remove the leading space as well, as it is emitted by diff.)

Answer 2

The simple way I have seen is this.. Much easy to remember (The text format changes. So you need to know the code change)

git diff --color-words

Here is a way to make it default
If you are using linux add the following command to your ~/.bashrc file
Then you can use gitdiff without space as another command .

alias gitdiff='git diff --color-words'

Answer 3

For mac users you'll have to use the below command:

git diff --color | sed -E "s/^([^-+ ]*)[-+ ]/\\1/" | less -r

caleb531 provided it in the accepted answer but there was a small typo.

Then if you want to throw this in an alias you can do the following:

alias gitdiff='git diff --color | sed -E "s/^([^-+ ]*)[-+ ]/\\1/" | less -r'

Answer 4

If I may answer my own question, I ultimately settled on using a tool called diff-so-fancy. It not only strips the +/- from my diffs, but it also streamlines the file headers and highlights the changes within each line.