On: How Core Git Developers Configure Git

[leonheld]

After using delta for a while, I'm going back to the regular diff view... it's not that it isn't good, but I'm constantly copying diffs (yes, I know I can generate patches) and the pretty output breaks that workflow.

Also, when your terminal is a bit small it's a bit hard to see things. But it's really good software, I recommend anyone who's reading to give it a try.

[JadedBlueEyes → leonheld]

IIRC if you pipe the output to, e.g, xclip, or redirect to a file it will give the original diff format. Not as convenient, but still workable.

[leonheld → JadedBlueEyes]

I... did not know that! Yep yep that should do the trick for me. Thanks a lot, actually!

[mplanchard → leonheld]

Most tools that do formatted output, if they’re well-behaved, should try to detect if their output is a pipe and if so, disable formatting.

Some examples that I can think of off the top of my head (in addition to git) are ripgrep and jq, both of which do the right thing and strip formatting.

[knome → mplanchard]

rather they should detect that output is a terminal and enable the coloring

[pca006132 → JadedBlueEyes]

Wow I never knew this, I always just type `--no-ext-diff` when piping the output. Thanks!

[ramses0 → pca006132]

`... | cat` is sometimes really handy (and universal)

[lucasoshiro → ramses0]

I use git -c core.pager = less, but piping seems to be a less verbose option... hmmm I'll try it

[rusk → JadedBlueEyes]

Pipe through cat should work

[PhilippGille → leonheld]

Isn't copying without the formatting just a `<your diff command> | pbcopy` away?

[genewitch → PhilippGille]

I have Gemini set to decipher HN comments that I don't immediately understand. This is a macos only command `pbcopy`?

Aside: Gemini mentioned it didn't want me to ask it questions about bikeshedding what shade of blue on a website header so I think it's got our number.

[Macha → genewitch]

Though, if you have a preferred shade of blue, you can actually use it for the HN header in your user settings.

[chuckadams → genewitch]

Yes pbcopy is a mac thing. On Linux, there are of course many different commands in different environments/distros. xsel, xclip, wl-clipboard, wlclip to name a few.

On windows, powershell has Get-Clipboard and Set-Clipboard, and cmd.exe has `wsl` to fix the issue of having used cmd.exe to begin with.

[jeeva → chuckadams]

There's also clip(.exe) on every version of Windows I've bumped into recently.

[ramses0 → chuckadams]

On Linux I made a ~/bin/pbcopy that does the right thing because all the Linux commands are stupidly difficult to remember compared to "pbcopy".