drift

A git diff pager that actually wants to be looked at.

drift takes the diff you already know and drops it into a real terminal UI: syntax highlighting, word-level change emphasis, split or unified views, a file-list modal and a live sidebar you can click and drag to resize, jump-to-hunk, in-file search, open-in-$EDITOR, and a live mode that repaints the moment your index or branch moves. Point it at a commit, your staging area, or your working tree, or just pipe a diff into it like any other pager.

No config needed to start. Themes, colors, and keys are all yours to bend later.

Install

Homebrew (macOS, Linux)

brew install aymanbagabas/tap/drift

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add aymanbagabas https://github.com/aymanbagabas/scoop-bucket
scoop install drift

Cargo

cargo install drift-diff

Or grab the prebuilt binary from the GitHub release instead of compiling:

cargo binstall drift-diff

npm

npm install -g @aymanbagabas/drift

Debian / Ubuntu

echo 'deb [trusted=yes] https://repo.aymanbagabas.com/apt/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/aymanbagabas.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install drift

Fedora / RHEL

echo '[aymanbagabas]
name=Ayman Bagabas
baseurl=https://repo.aymanbagabas.com/yum/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0' | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/aymanbagabas.repo
sudo yum install drift

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S drift-diff-bin

Nix (NUR)

From the Nix User Repositories, install nur.repos.aymanbagabas.drift. Or run it ad-hoc without configuring NUR:

nix-shell -p '(import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/aymanbagabas/nur/archive/master.tar.gz") {}).drift'

Prebuilt binaries

Grab an archive for your platform from the latest release and put the drift binary on your PATH.

Every method installs a drift binary.

Shell completions

drift completes its flags and option values, paths after --, and git revisions: refs, commit hashes, HEAD~2 ancestors, HEAD@{1} reflog entries, @{upstream}, HEAD:src/ paths, and both ends of a range like main..feature.

The Homebrew, deb, rpm, apk, AUR, and Nix packages set this up for bash, zsh, and fish. Otherwise, add the line for your shell to its startup file:

eval "$(drift --completions bash)"   # bash: ~/.bashrc
source <(drift --completions zsh)    # zsh: ~/.zshrc, after compinit
drift --completions fish | source    # fish: ~/.config/fish/completions/drift.fish

For PowerShell, add drift --completions powershell | Out-String | Invoke-Expression to $PROFILE. For Elvish, add eval (drift --completions elvish | slurp) to rc.elv.

zsh and fish treat an unmatched { as brace expansion, and PowerShell treats it as the start of a script block. To complete a reflog entry in these shells, quote the word ('HEAD@{). In zsh and fish, you can also escape the brace (HEAD@\{).

Use it

drift                     # working tree vs HEAD
drift -A                  # ...and untracked files too
drift --staged            # what's staged (alias: --cached)
drift HEAD~3              # a single commit
drift main..feature       # a range
drift -w                  # watch the repo and refresh on every change
git diff | drift          # pager mode: read a diff from stdin

[!TIP] Pair it with an AI agent. Leave drift -w open in a split while an agent (Copilot, Claude, etc.) works, every edit lands on screen instantly. Press F to freeze the view when you want to read, and again to resume.

Make it your default pager for git diff and git show:

git config --global pager.diff drift
git config --global pager.show drift

As the git show pager, drift shows the commit's hash, author, date, and message above its diff. drift prints output that isn't a diff, such as git show HEAD:README.md or git show --stat, straight to the terminal.

drift defaults to the ansi theme — your terminal's own colors, with syntax highlighting off. Pick a theme to turn it on, globally via git config:

git config --global drift.theme onedark   # onelight, dracula, nord, gruvbox-dark, ...

Some flags worth knowing:

Keys

The footer shows your position in the whole diff: Top, a percentage such as 42%, or Bot. It shows All when the whole diff fits on screen. Percentages use the top visible document row, including progress through a wrapped row. The indicator stays hidden while the initial diff loads.

Mouse

drift is fully mouse-driven too:

• Click a file in the sidebar to jump straight to it in the diff.
• Click a file in the file modal to select it; the modal stays open until you click outside it (or press enter).
• Drag the sidebar's divider to resize it, live.
• In split view, drag the divider between the two panes to rebalance them.
• Click the ? help badge in the status bar to toggle the help footer.
• Double-click the commit line to expand or collapse the commit metadata; on a hunk header, double-click expands the folded context.
• Drag across the diff to select text; it lands on your system clipboard (over SSH too, via OSC 52). In split view the selection stays within one pane, so you copy just the old or just the new side.
• Scroll wheel moves the page through the diff (the cursor stays put until it reaches an edge). Scroll the wheel left/right to pan wide lines horizontally.

Themes

Set theme = "..." in your config, or git config drift.theme .... The default is ansi — your terminal's own 16 colors, with syntax highlighting and word-diff emphasis left off. Any other built-in theme turns highlighting on:

• onedark, onelight
• dracula
• gruvbox-dark, gruvbox-light
• nord
• solarized-dark, solarized-light
• catppuccin-mocha, catppuccin-latte
• tokyonight
• monokai
• ansi — the default: borrows your terminal's own 16 colors so drift matches whatever palette you already run. It leaves code text and word-diff emphasis alone, since 16 colors are too few to layer cleanly over diff colors.

A handful of syntect theme names also work, but only the seven that ship in syntect's default set — InspiredGitHub, Solarized (dark), Solarized (light), base16-eighties.dark, base16-mocha.dark, base16-ocean.dark, and base16-ocean.light. They color the code but won't repaint the UI chrome to match, and (Solarized aside) the built-ins above already cover them with matching chrome. Any other theme name — a custom .tmTheme, or a syntect theme not in that set — silently falls back to onedark.

The themes/ directory has a full, commented config for every built-in theme. Copy one and go:

mkdir -p ~/.config/drift
cp themes/dracula.toml ~/.config/drift/config.toml

Config

drift looks for a config file, in order, at:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/drift/config.{toml,yaml,yml,json}
• ~/.config/drift/config.{toml,yaml,yml,json}
• ~/.drift.toml

TOML, YAML, and JSON all work. The top-level knobs:

theme         = "onedark"   # any built-in or syntect theme name
syntax        = true        # highlight diff content
intraline     = true        # word-level change emphasis
line-numbers  = true        # old/new line-number gutter
commit-meta   = true        # expand author/date/message; the commit line always shows for a single commit
wrap          = false       # wrap long lines instead of scrolling horizontally (toggle with w)
wrap-symbol   = "↪"         # symbol shown at the start of each wrapped continuation line
expand-symbol = "›"         # gutter symbol on the collapsed commit line (expand to show metadata)
collapse-symbol = "⌄"       # gutter symbol on the expanded commit line (collapse to hide metadata)
context-symbol = "⋯"        # gutter symbol on a hunk header (reveal more context)
tab-width     = 4
editor        = ""          # falls back to $VISUAL, then $EDITOR, then vi
sidebar       = "auto"      # "auto" (opens at width >= 150), "always", or "never"
sidebar-width = 30          # sidebar columns; drag its divider to resize live
sidebar-side  = "left"      # "left" or "right"

Colors come in two layers. [colors] is a named palette; [styles] maps UI components to a fg bg attrs... spec resolved against that palette. Every color token accepts a palette name, a literal #rrggbb, a 0-255 index, an ANSI color name, or default/none/- for the terminal's own color. See any file in themes/ for the full set with comments.

From git config

Anything you can set in a config file, you can set in git config under the drift section, which is handy for per-repo overrides. Colors and styles go in colors and styles subsections. Git forbids _ in a key, so a field like add_emph becomes add-emph:

git config drift.theme nord
git config drift.line-numbers false
git config drift.colors.add '#00ff00'
git config drift.colors.add-emph '#003300'
git config drift.styles.statusbar 'foreground surface bold'

Or in ~/.gitconfig directly:

[drift]
    theme = nord
    line-numbers = false
[drift "colors"]
    add = "#00ff00"
    add-emph = "#003300"
[drift "styles"]
    statusbar = "foreground surface bold"
    selection = "none #ffd700"

For the full list of every setting, color, component style, and flag, see CONFIG.md.

Built with

drift's terminal UI is powered by uncurses, and its multi-channel releases are cut with GoReleaser.

License

MIT