Quantifying the amount of change in a git diff?

Question

I use git for a slightly unusual purpose--it stores my text as I write fiction. (I know, I know...geeky.)

I am trying to keep track of productivity, and want to meas

Answer 1

Git has had (for a long time) a --color-words option for git diff. This doesn't get you your counting, but it does let you see the diffs.

scompt.com's suggestion of wdiff is also good; it's pretty easy to shove in a different differ (see git-difftool). From there you just have to go from the output wdiff can give to the result you really want.

There's one more exciting thing to share, though, from git's what's cooking:

* tr/word-diff (2010-04-14) 1 commit
  (merged to 'next' on 2010-05-04 at d191b25)
 + diff: add --word-diff option that generalizes --color-words

Here's the commit introducing word-diff. Presumably it will make its way from next into master before long, and then git will be able to do this all internally - either producing its own word diff format or something similar to wdiff. If you're daring, you could build git from next, or just merge that one commit into your local master to build.

Thanks to Jakub's comment: you can further customize word diffs if necessary by providing a word regex (config parameter diff.*.wordRegex), documented in gitattributes.