Home How to open Git changesets

How to open Git changesets

Many Git GUI clients offer convenient ways to compare commits using an external tool such as Kaleidoscope. Check out the documentation of your tool of choice. If you are missing that functionality, contact the vendor and have them talk to us for integration options. We are happy to provide developers with information on how to integrate with Kaleidoscope.

Setup

While some clients may not even need both, please go ahead and setup the ksdiff command line tool and the git integration using the Kaleidoscope Integration window:

Command Line Usage

Graphical Git clients typically rely on functionality built into Git itself to compare changes in Git repositories, in particular the git difftool command.

Compare two arbitrary commits

This assumes you know the hashes of both commits you want to compare. You can find those out via git log or any other way. Assuming you did follow the steps above you can just enter:

git difftool <HASH1> <HASH2>

Compare uncommitted changes in the current working directory

Use this command to show the current changes that have not yet been committed to the repository. This is a very useful way to double-check changes before committing and even cleaning up changes:

git difftool HEAD

Compare two branches

You may want to double-check all changes made in a feature branch before merging it back to the main/develop branch of your repository. Assuming your main branch is named develop and your feature branch is named feature/one, use this command:

git difftool develop feature/one

Branches, pull requests,…

Many more useful commands exist to compare specific tags or inspect pull requests before merging.