I'm running git-diff on a file, but the change is at the end of a long line.
If I use cursor keys to move right it loses colour coding and worse the lines don't line up, making it harder to track the change.
Is there a way to prevent that problem, or to simply make the lines wrap instead?
(running git 1.5.5 via mingw32)
Not a perfect solution, but gitk and git-gui can both show this information, and have scrollbars.
When in trouble, I often resort to DiffMerge. Excellent diff tool that has in-line diff highlighting. Also, in the latest versions they added a mode to have an horizontal mode.
I haven't been able to configure git to use it, though. So I do have to muck around to get both versions of the file first.
The display of the output of git diff is handled by whatever pager you are using.
Commonly, under Linux, less would be used.
You can tell git to use a different pager by setting the GIT_PAGER environment variable. If you don't mind about paging (for example, your terminal allows you to scroll back) you might try explicitly setting GIT_PAGER to empty to stop it using a pager. Under Linux:
$ GIT_PAGER='' git diff
Without a pager, the lines will wrap.
If your terminal doesn't support coloured output, you can also turn this off using either the --no-color argument, or putting an entry in the color section of your git config file.
$ GIT_PAGER='' git diff --no-color
Or if you use less as default pager just type '-S' while viewing the diff to reenable wrapping in less.
You can also use git config to setup pager to wrap.
$ git config core.pager 'less -r'
Sets the pager setting for the current project.
$ git config --global core.pager 'less -r'
Sets the pager globally for all projects