delta

A syntax-highlighting pager for git diff, grep, and blame output. Drop it into your gitconfig as core.pager and every diff, log, show, and blame command gets language-aware highlighting, word-level change detection, and optional side-by-side view — without changing how you use git.

Setup — add to ~/.gitconfig:

[core]
    pager = delta

[interactive]
    diffFilter = delta --color-only

[delta]
    navigate = true
    dark = true
    side-by-side = true
    line-numbers = true

[merge]
    conflictStyle = zdiff3

What it does beyond plain git diff:

• Syntax highlighting using bat's theme library (all bat themes work)
• Word-level diff highlighting via Levenshtein edit inference — shows exactly which characters changed within a line
• Side-by-side view with automatic line wrapping
• Line numbers
• n/N navigation between files in large diffs or between commits in log -p
• Improved merge conflict display
• Syntax-highlighted git blame with hyperlinks to the hosting provider (GitHub, GitLab, SourceHut, Codeberg)
• Syntax-highlighted grep output from rg, git grep, grep
• Support for git's --color-moved
• Copy-friendly: +/- markers are removed by default so you can copy code directly from diffs
• Commit hashes and file paths as clickable terminal hyperlinks
• Automatic light/dark detection
• Emulation modes for diff-highlight and diff-so-fancy

Also handles plain unified diff output (not just git), so you can pipe any diff through it.

Install: package is called git-delta in most package managers (brew install git-delta, apt install git-delta), but the binary is just delta.

Repo: https://github.com/dandavison/delta — 30k stars, MIT license.