Comments on: Mac OS X color showing ESC[whatever for git-diff colors (and more)

By: Jon Erdman

Jon Erdman — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 06:17:32 +0000

Thanks, fixed me on Ubuntu/Debian.

By: not-just-yeti

not-just-yeti — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 13:25:25 +0000

Thanks, git diff and git show now work like a charm for me; in fact, they are positively beautiful in color. (I'd previously been kludging by using git diff --no-color ....) Reading less's man page also led me to its options --no-init [leave the file on-screen after finishing, rather than restore the terminal window to its pre-less state] and --quit-if-one-screen, both helpful in non-git contexts. (However, --quit-if-one-screen without --no-init is truly scary: it makes me think short files are entirely empty, since it immediately over-draws what it just displayed!) Oddly: If the environment variable $LESS is entirely unset, the defaults work well (as @Lantrix suggests). However, setting $LESS to anything at all (even the empty string) suddenly yields all-options-off rather than default-options. (I'm using OS X 10.6..8, and less --version reports "less 418".)

By: Ricardo Parada

Ricardo Parada — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:27:47 +0000

Thank you so much. For months I struggled to get colors to display correctly in Terminal when using git. I looked in all the wrong places and tried all kinds of things. And your post helped me fix this problem.

By: Brian Cunnie

Brian Cunnie — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:47:33 +0000

Thanks, I was having the same problem under FreeBSD.

By: Carlo

Carlo — Mon, 30 May 2011 05:32:11 +0000

Thanks, that did the trick on our Linux HPC.

By: fwip

fwip — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 18:26:34 +0000

Thanks a ton. Also, pablitostar, you get my nomination for most helpful comment.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Wed, 19 May 2010 04:44:59 +0000

Thanks a lot! Very helpful =)

By: Michal

Michal — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:58:17 +0000

You are my hero for today!

By: Bart van Deenen

Bart van Deenen — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:08:05 +0000

Thanks. Your post fixed my issues on OpenSuse 11.2.

By: Gopala Krishna A

Gopala Krishna A — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:04:37 +0000

Thanks a lot!! This really proved helpful on opensuse 11.2

By: Silly Avatar

Silly Avatar — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:39:16 +0000

Thanx for this blog entry.
Was having this problem while ssh-ing to a linux vps w/Putty. Thought it was a faulty terminal emulation causing the problem. Nope, just the goofy default LESS options in OpenSuSe on the vps. I’ve run linux boxen for years off and on. Never had so much problem with raw ESC character output til it was highlighted by git.

By: Girish KS

Girish KS — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:37:54 +0000

Thanks for the post Nate and thanks pablitostar for your suggestion. I started using git few days back and was totally annoyed by ESC chars in diff !

By: pablitostar

pablitostar — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:07:25 +0000

I found using the -r flag did fix git-diff, but it broke something else in less. Specifically, searching in files using less. The token would be found, but some of the matching lines would be hidden. Not very useful, that. I changed the less flag from -r to -R and both git-diff and less search works. Here’s a snippet from the less man page, which is very apropos to git-diff:
-R or –RAW-CONTROL-CHARS
Like -r, but only ANSI “color” escape sequences are output in
“raw” form. Unlike -r, the screen appearance is maintained cor-
rectly in most cases. ANSI “color” escape sequences are
sequences of the form:

ESC [ … m

By: Rohit Garg

Rohit Garg — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:00:13 +0000

Hi,

Thanks for your googling and your blog. I was having the same issues on opensuse 11.1.

http://rpg-314.blogspot.com/2009/10/getting-colors-i-git-output-on-opensuse.html

This post helped me fix it. Thanks a lot.

By: Lantrix

Lantrix — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:37:01 +0000

Looks like this is fixed under Snow Leopard. I get colours with my config set correctly in ~/.gitconfig and I _did not_ need to have the less switches in my ~/.profile

By: Giorgio Gonnella

Giorgio Gonnella — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:30:33 +0000

Thank you very much! I had exactly the same problem, now is solved. I wish this was documented in git tutorials, although is not directly git related…

By: Björn Skoglund

Björn Skoglund — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:48:19 +0000

Weird stuff, your post fixed my colors on OpenSuSE at work but strangely enough I have had no problems on my Leopard iMac at home.

By: binOr

binOr — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:24:46 +0000

Thank you so much! I was annoyed by “^M” ’s at the end of the diff lines. Now they are gone!

By: Sir Bode Rafael

Sir Bode Rafael — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:59:27 +0000

Hi!

Thanks for this Post!

I was experiencing this kind of trouble since I’ve started working on git!

Best Brazilian Regards!

By: cygo

cygo — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:19:23 +0000

“After perusing the man page for a while …”

Maybe it’s a bit easier to scan man pages for essential information using:

pman, http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/4274

openman, http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/1599

Just a not-quite-on-topic tip!

And thanks for sharing the export LESS=”-erX” hint!