Ignore *all* whitespace changes with git-diff between commits

Question

I'm going through a codebase and fixing whitespace oddities and generally correcting indentation and such things, and I want to make sure I haven't inadvertently made any other changes, so I'm doing git diff -w to display differences in all changed files while ignoring whitespace differences. The problem is that this is not actually ignoring all whitespace differences—at least what I consider to be merely whitespace differences. For instance, in the following output from git diff -w,

-"Links":
-{
-
-    "Thermal":
-
-{
-
+  "Links": {
+    "Thermal": {

you can see that I've only

1. removed superfluous blank lines,
2. put curly braces on the end of the line of the key whose value they open, and
3. indented to fit the context

This question looked like it might offer an answer at first, but it deals with differences between two specific files, not between two specific commits. Everything else turned up by searching was a dead end as well. For instance, this question is about merging, not displaying differences, and this question deals with displaying word-level differences, and so forth.

Solution 1

Perhaps there is a better answer, but the best solution I've found so far is this.

First, you must control the definition of "whitespace" that Git is currently using.

git config core.whitespace '-trailing-space,-indent-with-non-tab,-tab-in-indent'

Next, you must control the definition of a word used. Instead of just using git diff -w, add --word-diff-regex='[^[:space:]]':

git diff -w --word-diff-regex='[^[:space:]]'

You'll still see the context, which (in my case, since I'm trying to ensure that there are no differences except whitespace differences) is not helpful. You can use -U0 to tell Git to give you 0 lines of context, like so,

git diff -w -U0 --word-diff-regex='[^[:space:]]'

but you'll still get output that looks pretty much like context, but it's still much better than looking through all the changes carefully and manually to make sure they are only whitespace changes.

You can also do all the above in one command. The -c flag changes git config just for one command.

git -c core.whitespace=-trailing-space,-indent-with-non-tab,-tab-in-indent diff -U0 --word-diff-regex='[^[:space:]]'

Solution 2

Ignore all whitespace changes with git-diff between commits

This question looked like it might offer an answer at first, but it deals with differences between two specific files, not between two specific commits. Everything else turned up by searching was a dead end as well....

I think you are having trouble because Git is the wrong tool for the job. It does not make the task easy, and yielding to accommodate the tool is the wrong approach. Tools are supposed to work for you and not vice versa.

Perform a second clone, and then checkout the starting revision in question. Then run regular diff on them using your current revision: diff -bur --ignore-all-space <dir1> <dir2>.

Here are some of the options for diff

-i, --ignore-case
       ignore case differences in file contents

-E, --ignore-tab-expansion
       ignore changes due to tab expansion

-Z, --ignore-trailing-space
        ignore white space at line end

-b, --ignore-space-change
       ignore changes in the amount of white space

-w, --ignore-all-space
       ignore all white space

-B, --ignore-blank-lines
       ignore changes where lines are all blank

Comments

[jww]

@Torek - yet another piece of Git goodness. Why in the hell is it so difficult to diff without all whitespace??? I'm on a Windows machine trying to evaluate a PR on Visual Studio project files. I don't care about CR, LF or CRLF differences, but that's what Git is filling my terminal with.

[Gerry]

and people don't understand why I hate git

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

None of these options help in this case: diff still treats a line break as different from not having a line break.

[StR]

Anyway to create an alias for it?

[Schulp]

@StR you can make an alias in .gitconfig with the following in your [alias] section: diffw = diff -w -U0 --word-diff-regex=[^[:space:]]

[Morteza]

with latest git (v2.20.1): error: invalid option: -Z

[saraf]

@MortezaZiaeemehr the option are for the diff command, not the git command. This answer recommends using the diff tool, and not using git for the job at hand.

[mix3d]

Also had issues with invalid option. --ignore-all-space and --ignore-cr-at-eol worked for me.

[NSjonas]

I get an error: no matches found: --word-diff-regex=[^[:space:]] when I try this. Any thoughts?

[cambunctious]

@NSjonas I got the same error. You need to add quotes. I edited the commands in the answer.