If you’re anything like me (I feel sorry for you), then you use git diff pretty heavily. I like making sure I’m definitely committing what I think I’m committing, and I also like to verify my indentation, trailing whitespace, line endings, and so on are correct before I commit. I don’t tend to use many GUI tools for Git, so I end up paging through terminal output. While this works fine, I’ve discovered a solution I like more.

It involves Ryan Tomayko’s bcat, which is a pipe-to-browser utility. Since it supports ANSI/VT100 escape sequences, we even get nice color formatting. After installing bcat, our options are two-fold for using it with Git:

1. Pipe output to bcat

If you only want to use bcat from time to time, you can easily pipe ouptut from a Git command to bcat:

git diff | bcat

To get color, specify it as an option to git diff:

git diff --color | bcat 

2. Set bcat as Git’s pager

If you want to use bcat for every operation Git sends to your pager, try the following:

export GIT_PAGER=bcat
git diff
git log
git log --oneline --decorate

And there you have it! Easy reviewing if your diffs in your browser. Be sure to check out the other examples on bcat’s homepage for some really neat uses!