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

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'

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Update:
To set alias directly through git config (Without the help of ~/.bashrc)
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Git-Aliases
Thank you @dylankb for this.

Example: If you enter the command git config --global alias.ci commit;
then you can use git ci for rest of your life for committing!!

Happy Gitting :)

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.