I used git diff origin often in the past.
In a different environment it does not work. I have no clue why.
user@host> git diff origin
Sometimes things might be simpler. I came here with the exact issue and tried all the suggestions. But later found that the problem was just the local file path was different and I was on a different folder. :-)
eg -
~/myproject/mygitrepo/app/$ git diff app/TestFile.txt
should have been
~/myproject/mygitrepo/app/$ git diff TestFile.txt