32,100 stars · MIT, read from /blob/main/LICENSE — standard wording, no added clauses, holder named 'Copyright 2020 Dan Davison'. Cargo.toml agrees with license = 'MIT' · 0.20.1 (2026-10-04), read from /releases/latest as a yearless '04 Oct 19:38' and settled by the crates.io API for the crate git-delta (version created_at 2026-10-04T19:32:21Z). The crates.io HTML page 404s to a fetcher and ungh /releases returned 429 twice · Track this in Scout
Makes the output of git diff readable, with syntax colouring, line numbers, word-level highlighting and an optional side-by-side view.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
Delta is a pager — a program that formats text on its way to a terminal — written for Git's difference output. It also understands git log, git show, git blame, grep and rg --json output, and it can show two columns side by side.
What it is good for. Anyone who reads code changes in a terminal, which is to say anyone who uses Git without an editor doing it for them. It is the clearest example in this edition of a small change with a large daily return: the thing you were already doing becomes easy to read, and nothing has to be learned.
- Two minutes, and the reward arrives every time Git prints a difference from then on.
- Plain, unmodified MIT with a named holder, "Copyright 2020 Dan Davison". No conditions worth worrying about.
- Packaged almost everywhere. Homebrew, apt, dnf, pacman, Nix, FreeBSD, Chocolatey, Scoop and Winget all carry it, so no compiling is needed.
- The names do not match, and this catches people out. The repository is
delta, the package in almost every package manager isgit-delta, and the program you then run isdelta. Installingdeltaby that name gets a different program on several systems. - It declares no minimum Rust version and no minimum Git version. Installing through
cargo installmeans compiling a fairly large Rust project on the machine, which is the slow route; a packaged binary is the fast one. - Its settings surface is large and its real documentation is a separate manual rather than the README, so the first configuration takes longer than the install. It publishes no memory, disk or processor figure.
- so-fancy/diff-so-fancy
Tidies the same Git output into something readable, as a Perl script, but with no syntax colouring and no side-by-side view.
Track this in Scout - Wilfred/difftastic
Compares the structure of the code rather than the lines, so moved or reformatted code shows as unchanged.
Track this in Scout - banga/git-split-diffs
Side-by-side coloured differences in the terminal, in a smaller Node.js tool with no support for grep or blame output.
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brew install git-delta
