dv

A beautiful, snappy, and highly interactive tool for exploring diffs without leaving your terminal.

Run dv with no arguments to see changes currently tracked by git, or pipe a diff directly into it.

[!NOTE] dv is currently in beta, but I'd love your early feedback! Feel free to open a Discussion to chat about ideas or an Issue to raise a bug.

Quick demo

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/e9beadc9-0e77-47e2-86aa-bb869c657863

Highlights

• Unified and split diffs
• Snappy native terminal app
• Lots of pretty themes
• Keyboard centric
• Mouse support
• Command palette
• Synchronised scrolling
• Intraline diff highlighting
• Supports piped input

Installation

Install it using Homebrew:

brew install darrenburns/homebrew/dv

Alternatively install using Go (ensure $GOPATH/bin or $HOME/go/bin is in your PATH):

go install github.com/darrenburns/dv@latest

Then run it like this:

dv

dv displays your current staged/unstaged files from git.

Piped Input

You can also pipe a diff directly into dv:

git diff | dv
gh pr diff <number> | dv

Things you can do

Most keybinds are documented either in the footer, command palette (ctrl+p), or in the UI itself.

Some things that aren't as clear at the moment:

• Press r to refresh files tracked by git
• You can click and drag the sidebar divider to resize it.
• You can click and drag the central divider when in side-by-side/split view to adjust the ratio.
  • As a shortcut you can use ctrl+h/ctrl+l to shift it left/right.
• Tab and shift-tab move focus
• Press / from the file tree or diff view to filter files (if the sidebar is hidden, this opens it). While the filter input is focused, up/down move through matching files, tab moves focus back to the tree, and esc clears the filter.
• Press y to copy the active file or directory path to your clipboard (also available via the command palette).
• Press m to toggle seen on the active file, or M to clear all seen marks (both are also available in the command palette).
• Press ctrl+j/ctrl+k to move to the next/previous file (same as n/p).

Startup options

There are a few CLI options available for customising dv.

Example using all options:

dv --view split --sidebar=false --theme catppuccin --intraline-style underline --show-symbols

Config file

dv can load startup defaults from a YAML config file.

Default path:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/dv/config.yaml

This path is resolved using xdg.ConfigHome via the github.com/adrg/xdg package.

Precedence:

1. CLI flags
2. Config file
3. Built-in defaults

You can also use:

• --config /path/to/config.yaml to load an explicit file path.
• --no-config to disable config loading for a run.

Example config file:

view: split
sidebar: true
theme: catppuccin
intraline-style: underline
show-symbols: false
ignore-whitespace: true

Notes:

• For string flags, both --flag value and --flag=value work.
• For booleans, prefer --flag=false when disabling.
• ignore-whitespace is unavailable in piped mode (git diff | dv); apply whitespace flags before piping.