Git Diff - Full File View

[noahschumacher]

One thing I love about viewing diffs in VSCode compared to Github is that I can view the complete uncollapsed file. This is really useful when trying to get broader context on the changes. Clicking through multiple expand up and downs is a lot of friction.

[FloppyDisco]

yes, i feel like i'm missing something.
is there no way to just open a diff of a single file!?!?

i don't want to open a multibuffer with all the changes in my entire project.
and i don't want to diff two arbitrary files in the project using 'compare selected'
i just want to look at a diff of the entire file...

feels a bit like this is where they should have started?? lol.

[FloppyDisco]

@noahschumacher

I have worked out a solution that will allow us to diff a full file relatively easily.
zed should certainly add diffing a full file to the application but this works for now.
it uses a custom task which you can assign to a keybinding.

essentially.
zed the command line tool accepts a --diff option and can open a diff view of any two arbitrary files; however it does not seem to have any built in way of selecting a file with a different git scheme.
so we need to create a temporary file using git show

you will need to have the zed cli installed in your path which you can do by opening the command palette and running install cli binary

ideally we would be able to run a task that just diffs the currently open file.
however in issue #40118 the env variables that are set for a task are not currently working correctly.
and this made it very frustrating because the task never opens the file you want.

so i found it the least painful to just select the file that i want to diff using fzf so you will need to have that installed in your path as well.

open the command palette and run zed: open tasks
and add this to your tasks.json

  {
    "label": "git - diff file",
    "command": "selected_file=$(git status --porcelain | fzf --accept-nth=2); tmp_dir=/tmp/$(openssl rand -hex 8); mkdir -p $tmp_dir; tmp_file=$tmp_dir/diff; git show HEAD:$selected_file > $tmp_file; zed --diff $tmp_file $selected_file; rm $tmp_file;",
    "use_new_terminal": true,
    "reveal_target": "center",
    "hide": "always"
  }

this should open an editor where you can select from a list of changes

and when you select one it should open up a new editor with the selected file diff

you can set this to be on a keybinding by putting this in your keybindings.json

{
  "context": "workspace",
  "bindings": {
      "cmd-alt-g": ["task::Spawn", { "task_name": "git - diff file" }],
   }
}

like i said.
ideally, this should be added as an action for the git panel. but this does everything i need it to for now.

cheers

[FloppyDisco]

@smitbarmase
showed me why i was getting weird behavior with the tasks env variables.

here is a second solution that will just open the file in the current Editor in a full file diff.

put this in your tasks.json.

  {
    "label": "diff",
    "command": "git show HEAD:$ZED_RELATIVE_FILE > /tmp/$ZED_FILENAME; zed --diff /tmp/$ZED_FILENAME $ZED_RELATIVE_FILE; rm /tmp/$ZED_FILENAME;",
    "reveal": "never",
    "hide": "always"
  },

and this in your keybindings.json

  {
    "context": "Editor",
    "bindings": {
        "cmd-alt-g": ["task::Spawn", { "task_name": "diff"}],
     }
  }

i also still like having the fzf picker because it does not require having the file open.
but this is also very handy to just be able to diff the current file.

[FloppyDisco]

@noahschumacher

ok. so after all that. I was looking through the docs and I actually discovered that Zed already has a action to view the git changes in a full file without any work arounds.
the docs are here

I don't think the documentation around this feature is written very well, and that is probably why there are so many repeated discussions requesting this feature.

go to the file that you would like to review and run editor: expand all diff hunks

this will show the git changes for the entire file.

you can navigate between changes with editor: go to hunk

and the stage, unstage,stage and next, etc. actions all work as well.