why doesn't my .gitconfig work? (for external diff)

Question

I added this in ~/.gitconfig:

[diff]
    external = mvimdiff

[difftool]
    prompt = false

and made a 755 /bin/mvimdiff that:

#!/bin/sh

mvim -d "$2" "$5"

in order to invoke MacVim as my git diff tool. But when I run command git diff in a git folder, it still output the result from normal diff to shell. No MacVim at all. I am sure that no .git/config overwrite the .gitconfig, and I have tried to restart my computer to refresh. Why doesn't the config work?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You may be better off using git difftool to invoke an “interactive” diff tool. For example:

Adapt the built-in gvimdiff tool to mvim:

git config --global diff.tool gvimdiff
git config --global difftool.gvimdiff.path mvim

Or, configure mvimdiff from scratch:

git config --global diff.tool mvimdiff
git config --global difftool.mvimdiff.cmd 'mvim -f -d "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"'

Then run git difftool to view the each differing file in MacVim.

---

If you really want git diff itself to use MacVim, then you can configure it like this (without any external script files):

git config diff.external 'd() { mvim -f -d "$2" "$5"; }; d'

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Either way, you need to make sure that the appropriate mvim is in your PATH. Also, you will need to use the -f option (“do not fork”/“run in foreground”) because otherwise git diff will probably delete the temporary files before MacVim has had a chance to read them (at least one file from each invocation will be a temporary file).