so-fancy/diff-so-fancy

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

18082 stars · 349 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

diff-so-fancy is a command-line utility that reformats git and unified diff output to be human-readable instead of machine-readable. It works as a git pager or diff filter, simplifying hunk headers, colorizing empty-line blocks, and stripping leading +/- symbols for faster defect spotting.

Use cases

• make git diff output easier to read in the terminal
• improve code review by highlighting changes more clearly
• format unified diff output from the diff command
• spot defects faster when reviewing patches
• simplify git hunk headers to file and line locations
• configure a nicer default pager for git diffs

When to choose

• you review git diffs daily in a terminal and want cleaner, more readable output
• you want a drop-in git pager/diffFilter that requires no daemon or GUI
• you need to pipe plain `diff -u` output through a readability formatter
• you want a lightweight, single-script tool installable via npm, brew, or system packages

When to avoid

• you need machine-readable diff output for scripts or automation
• you prefer side-by-side or GUI diff views such as those in IDEs
• you need semantic or word-level diffing beyond formatting improvements
• your environment cannot run Perl scripts

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

version-control developer-tools formatter developer-tools version-control cli cross-platform windows git diff diff-viewer pager terminal code-review perl readability command-line linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="so-fancy/diff-so-fancy")