Why doesn't `git diff` invoke external diff tool?

Question

In my repository, if I type

$ git diff some-file

or

$ git difftool some-file

I get the in-terminal diff displ

Answer 1

I usually just want to check whether the changes I'm about to check in are correct. So I followed the procedure suggested here (similar to the one noted by VonC). However, running git difftool still didn't open meld. I then created an alias:

alias git-diff='git difftool $(git rev-parse HEAD)'

Save this in your .bashrc or .zshrc or the corresponding config for your shell. This essentially compares the state of the branch with the previous commit on the branch.

Do a git-diff to see changes on a file per file basis or git-diff --dir to see all changes in a directory view.