delta

You can clean up git diffs a lot, I personally find them easy to ready anyway, with tools like delta[1] which make things super nice to read. Also if you use a text editor such as neovim you can integrate these things into your editor and get beautiful diffs right there. That said I do not use neovim or delta, I just use git diffs or my language ide's diff features. [1]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

> 3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. Um. I don't want to be That Guy (shouting at clouds, or at kids to get off my lawn or whatever) but ... what "usual diff" tools did you use? Because comparing two text files with minor edits is exactly what diff-related tools have excelled at for decades. There is word-level diff, for example. Was that not good enough? Or delta [0] perhaps? [0] https://github.com/dandavison/delta

Am I the only one who simply doesn't mind Git's CLI? Sure, it's rough around the edges, but I know those edges well. I sometimes do need to look up how to do something, but those cases are rare. Over the years I've accumulated about a dozen shell aliases and a modest `.gitconfig`, and along with a couple of helper tools[1][2], I can do 90% of what I need Git for in seconds. I truly don't need a fancy TUI, GUI, or any wrappers around Git. Git itself is fine. I tried Magit a few times, and even though Emacs is my main editor, I couldn't get used to it. It forces the user into doing things the "Magit way", and I'd rather not. I don't understand the push to replace Git's porcelain with something shinier. If, and when, a better VCS comes along that truly feels like the next step forward, I'll give it a try. In the meantime, Git does the job I

The "basics": Vim + PythonMode `python -m venv` for local environment separation Git + https://github.com/dandavison/delta for change management When I need a debugger or a Git GUI, VScode, but Zed is becoming more and more interesting. These support LLM interaction, but things like Claude Code fit better with the above list.

An alternative tool that also improves git diff functionality is Delta: https://github.com/dandavison/delta (personally I think Difftastic's treesitter based approach is superior to Delta, yet I always appreciate it when people link alternatives when discussing apps so thought I'd add this for completeness' sake)

You can also do that with delta (https://github.com/dandavison/delta), with additional options that you can put on your .gitconfig

At the end of the article, I also subtly plugged: * https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy * https://github.com/dandavison/delta Also both great TUI diff tools