colordiff

colordiff is a Perl wrapper for the standard diff command that adds ANSI color highlighting to the output. Additions, deletions, and context lines each appear in distinct colors, making it much easier to scan diffs at a glance without changing any of diff's underlying behavior.

The tool supports all of diff's output formats, including unified diffs, context diffs, side-by-side diffs, and specialized formats like wdiff and debdiff. You can use it as a drop-in replacement for diff, or pipe existing diff output through it.

Colors are fully configurable via a ~/.colordiffrc file, with separate configurations available for light and dark terminal backgrounds.

Basic usage

colordiff file1.txt file2.txt
diff -u file1.txt file2.txt | colordiff
git diff | colordiff