Viewing svn diff result in colors

svn diff allows us to see the changes made on the files in the subversion repository. However, its output  is not always clear. New lines are just marked with '+' and removed ones with '-'.

svn diff in black and white

We can improve our experience a bit by installing colordiff. It wraps diff command and produces the same output but coloured.

svn diff in colors

In ubuntu it's as simple as running:

sudo aptitude install colordiff

Once doing that we should be able to redirect the output of commands like diff and svn diff to colordiff and view it in colors:

svn diff plugins/zMobyPicturePlugin/lib/zMobyPictureClient.class.php | colordiff

To improve it even more we can declare simple function in ~/.bashrc file (using it requires re-login):

svndiff()
{
  svn diff "${@}" | colordiff
}

Function will make the command shorter:

svndiff plugins/zMobyPicturePlugin/lib/zMobyPictureClient.class.php

Note: You can achieve pretty much the same with vim. To learn about it read: "Viewing svn diff result in vim".

Posted on 16 June 2009 by Jakub Zalas • linux, ubuntu, installation, svn • No comments

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