Got this one from the git-ml (which I read via gmane, but that’s a dif­fer­ent post):

I’m not very good at re­view­ing patches. Es­pe­cially not if it’s some­thing like JavaScript. git at least col­orizes its diffs, which makes it some­what bet­ter. But as soon as you have a big file which is being patched in mul­ti­ple, dis­con­nected places (dif­fer­ent “hunks” in git ter­mi­nol­ogy), so that the con­text be­tween these hunks is miss­ing, it gets to messy imho.

git-difftool in action

For­tu­nately there is an easy so­lu­tion: In git there is con­trib/difftool, which makes it easy to dis­play git diffs side-by-side with a viewer of your choice. Of course that meant vimd­iff for me. To see all the lines of a file (and not just the changed + a lit­tle con­text) I call git-difftool like this:

git-difftool --tool=vimdiff -U99999Now you can alias that com­mand and use the nor­mal rev-parse ar­gu­ments. As you can see on the screen­shot you can eas­ily dis­tin­guish be­tween re­moved lines, added lines and changed lines. For changed lines the part that was changed is high­lighted.