Can I use git diff on untracked files?

Question

Is it possible to ask git diff to include untracked files in its diff output, or is my best bet to use git add on the newly created files and the e

Answer 1

For my interactive day-to-day gitting (where I diff the working tree against the HEAD all the time, and would like to have untracked files included in the diff), add -N/--intent-to-add is unusable, because it breaks git stash.

So here's my git diff replacement. It's not a particularly clean solution, but since I really only use it interactively, I'm OK with a hack:

d() {
    if test "$#" = 0; then
        (
            git diff --color
            git ls-files --others --exclude-standard |
                while read -r i; do git diff --color -- /dev/null "$i"; done
        ) | `git config --get core.pager`
    else
        git diff "$@"
    fi
}

Typing just d will include untracked files in the diff (which is what I care about in my workflow), and d args... will behave like regular git diff.

Notes:

• We're using the fact here that git diff is really just individual diffs concatenated, so it's not possible to tell the d output from a "real diff" -- except for the fact that all untracked files get sorted last.
• The only problem with this function is that the output is colorized even when redirected; but I can't be bothered to add logic for that.
• I couldn't find any way to get untracked files included by just assembling a slick argument list for git diff. If someone figures out how to do this, or if maybe a feature gets added to git at some point in the future, please leave a note here!