¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Let’s say you use color highlighting to visually inspect diffs with git, such as delta or diff-highlight or diffr.

Implication: whenever you run git diff, git show, or any other git command that produces a diff, it will emit colors (typically red and green).

Colors are great for local visual inspection, but they are terrible for sharing. They won’t be carried over with copy-and-paste.

If you intend to share diff output (e.g. to a Q&A site, with teammates), it’s better to emit - and +, as vanilla diff does.

The easiest way to do so is to pass --no-pager to git:

git --no-pager diff a83bc395
git --no-pager show HEAD

For example, a recent commit in my dotfiles:

% git --no-pager show HEAD~1
commit 52b1e91b0f1d93176ec768aa6158974fc401f335
Author: Thiago Perrotta <{redacted}>
Date:   Thu Aug 7 12:00:47 2025 +0200

    fix mr

diff --git bin/.bin/sd-world bin/.bin/sd-world
index c46be0e..44c0b47 100755
--- bin/.bin/sd-world
+++ bin/.bin/sd-world
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@ esac
 run_if_exists "claude" claude update

 # myrepos
-run_if_exists "mr" mr -d ~ update
+(cd ~ && run_if_exists "mr" mr update)

 # source corp updates if any
 run_if_exists "sd-world-corp"

Note that --no-pager is a git-level option: it should be specified before the git subcommand. The following does not work:

% git show HEAD~1 --no-pager
fatal: unrecognized argument: --no-pager