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Use meld as git diff gui viewer

Meld is a popular diff viewer in linux (gnome). It is extremely light weight. UI is very similar to WinDiff. Although it is not comprehensively robust yet, It is still a great help for people like me, handicapped to read huge diffs in command line.

Git is awesome when it comes to managing version control, esp in command line. However, while committing, you would want to check what changes are going in. git gives git-diff for this purpose. Spitting out a (unified) diff format text for showing changes. But reading this could be cumbersome at times. To visually inspect git diff, you can use the latest version of meld. The version that comes with debian or ubuntu 1.1.5 lacks git support. You need to build the latest meld (I got 1.2.1) from source. Here is how you can do it.
  • resolve dependencies: 
    sudo apt-get install pyorbit pygtk gnome-python intltool
  • Get the source from here (opens new window).
  • Extract the archive.
  • In the exploded directory, run make.
  • It makes an executable meld
  • Run meld path/to/git-project
  • That's it, if there are any modified files, it will display the changes.
meld and git
As an earlier alternative, if you have KDE or prefer to use kompare, You can pipe this to kompare to visually see the changes.
git diff . | kompare -o -

I have tried using egit for eclipse. It sure is good for many features (commit, track, reource history, pull et al) but misses the "compare with base version" feature as in svn. Meld fills in that gap.
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