¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

I’ve been using the venerable diff-highlight script to power various git diff operations in the terminal. It is a decent improvement on top of stock git diff, but it’s somewhat of an annoying maintenance burden to manage it across various environments, as it’s installed in different ways on various systems:

#!/bin/sh

if hash git >/dev/null 2>&1; then
	# git-diff-highlight: alpine:/usr/bin/, arch, debian
	path_munge "/usr/share/git/diff-highlight" "/usr/share/doc/git/contrib/diff-highlight"

	# brew
	if hash brew >/dev/null 2>&1; then
		path_munge "$(brew --prefix)"/share/git-core/contrib/diff-highlight
	fi

fi

Thus I decided to migrate to git-delta, which is:

• quite popular
• written in Rust™¹
• available in all package managers I’m interested in – hence it’s one install command away from my system, no need for extra configs <== And this is the main reason I wanted to migrate to it.

On macOS, the package is called git-delta whereas the binary is called delta:

% brew install git-delta
% brew ls git-delta | grep bin/
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/git-delta/0.18.2_3/bin/delta

The integration with git is as follows:

% grep -E '\[core\]|pager =|delta' ~/.gitconfig
[core]
        # delta > diff-highlight > plain cat
        pager = "delta --diff-highlight 2>/dev/null || ((diff-highlight 2>/dev/null || cat) | ${PAGER:-less})"

It falls back to diff-highlight when delta is not available.

delta is quite configurable:

% grep -EA3 '\[delta\]' ~/.gitconfig
[delta]
        navigate = true
        side-by-side = false
        line-numbers = true

One caveat of using delta: the git diff output is not suitable for sharing, as it does not contain diff markers, relying on colors instead. See this post for a workaround.

Update(2025-09-07): I’ve been finding delta quite pleasant to use.