Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Show images on git diff

Today I learned how to show binary files, more specifically images, using git diff or git show CLI. For that I am using iTerm2 imgcat.

In order to get there I had to configure git to allow a custom diff command to specific file types.

So I used git attributes to do that:

echo "*.gif diff=image" >> ~/.gitattributes
echo "*.jpg diff=image" >> ~/.gitattributes
echo "*.png diff=image" >> ~/.gitattributes
git config --global core.attributesfile '~/.gitattributes'

Then I had to change the git diff text converter to use iterm2 imgcat:

git config --global diff.image.textconv 'imgcat'

Check this out:

git-diff-images

Notes:

  • imgcat does not work with new versions of tmux
  • git pagers like less or more won't work either, so you can run git --no-pager diff or you can pipe with cat like:
git diff | cat

Check also Open images in vim

See More #git TILs