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Add word-diffing support#5784

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pogoba:word-diff
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Add word-diffing support#5784
pogoba wants to merge 2 commits into
jesseduffield:masterfrom
pogoba:word-diff

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@pogoba

@pogoba pogoba commented Jul 9, 2026 •
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PR Description

Press ctrl+g to toggle the patch view between show diffs line-wise vs word-wise. Similarly to the ctlr+w ignore-whitespace toggle, the word-diff state is shown alongside the (ignoring whitespace) status flag.

Please check if the PR fulfills these requirements

  • Cheatsheets are up-to-date (run go generate ./...)
  • Code has been formatted (see here)
  • Tests have been added/updated (see here for the integration test guide)
  • Text is internationalised (see here)
  • If a new UserConfig entry was added, make sure it can be hot-reloaded (see here)
  • Docs have been updated if necessary
  • You've read through your own file changes for silly mistakes etc

This PR is a draft because the PR checklist is incomplete. The main code has undergone human review, but the tests have not.

This PR is potentially a duplicate of:

pogoba and others added 2 commits July 7, 2026 20:07
@pogoba @claude
Add a word-diff toggle to the diff view
b75987f 
Line-level diffs make small in-word edits hard to spot: a one-word
change renders as a whole line removed and re-added. Git's
`--word-diff=color` highlights the changed words inline instead, which
is much easier to read for prose and for dense single-line changes.

Model it on the existing `<ctrl+w>` whitespace toggle rather than a
per-view binding: it's a global keybinding (`<ctrl+g>`) that flips an
in-memory config flag which the diff-building commands (working-tree
diff, `git show`, stash show, file diffs) consult when rendering, so it
works from any diff without first focusing the main view. The staging
and patch-building views are excluded, sharing one unsupported-context
list with the whitespace toggle, because word-diff collapses the +/-
lines that line-by-line staging depends on.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@pogoba @claude
Show active diff-view options in the main view subtitle
97f1b9e 
The main diff view already advertised `(ignoring whitespace)` in its
subtitle when that mode was on. Now that word-diff is a second toggle
that changes how the same diff is rendered, generalize that single-mode
subtitle into one that lists every active option, so `<ctrl+g>` gets the
same at-a-glance feedback `<ctrl+w>` has.

Rename the whitespace-specific helper to `DiffViewSubtitle` and have it
join the active tags (`(ignoring whitespace) (word diff)`); every diff
view already routed its subtitle through the one helper, so they all
pick up the word-diff tag without further changes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@stefanhaller

stefanhaller commented Jul 9, 2026

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See here for why I don't want this: #5209 (comment)

Besides, this project does not accept PRs anyway, see CONTRIBUTING.md.

@pogoba

pogoba commented Jul 9, 2026

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I see. I'm not familiar with the "different pagers" feature yet, but i will look into it.

Do you think it makes sense to ship one or two common git diff based pager scripts directly with a default lazygit installation?

@pogoba pogoba closed this Jul 9, 2026
@stefanhaller

stefanhaller commented Jul 9, 2026

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Do you think it makes sense to ship one or two common git diff based pager scripts directly with a default lazygit installation?

Personally I don't think so. I find actual pagers vastly superior to --word-diff/--color-words. I personally use delta as the default pager, it does a pretty good job at highlighting word changes, and in those few cases where it doesn't I switch to difftastic on demand.

@pogoba

pogoba commented Jul 9, 2026 •
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At least we could add the git diff --work-diff config example to https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/Custom_Pagers.md ?

Config example: #4921 (comment)

@stefanhaller stefanhaller mentioned this pull request Jul 10, 2026
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@stefanhaller

stefanhaller commented Jul 10, 2026

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Makes sense, #5795.

stefanhaller added a commit that referenced this pull request Jul 10, 2026
@stefanhaller
Add a hint about how to use diff --color-words or --word-diff in …
a61727c 
…lazygit (#5795)

Since this frequently comes up as a feature request (but there are
reasons why we don't want to add it), explain how to do this in lazygit
today.

See
#5784 (comment).
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2 participants

@pogoba @stefanhaller