Git diff shows diff details of uncommitted changes

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Git diff shows diff details of uncommitted changes

Author：JIYIK Last Updated：2025/03/31 Views：

This article outlines how we can get diff details of uncommitted work in Git. We use the git diff command to show the differences between various Git references, such as commits, the index, and the working tree.

We can use this command to display details of unsubmitted work, as we will discuss below.

Show diff details of uncommitted changes in Git

For a simpler context, we will use an example. Assume that the following diagram represents the current state of the working directory in our repository.

Working Directory

Both the above files belong to the category of uncommitted work. However, the git diff command works differently on staged and unstaged files.

To see this more clearly, let's start with basic git diff with no arguments .

$ git diff

The output is as follows:

git diff no param

You'll notice that the command without arguments git diffwill only show changes to unstaged files. From the Git documentation, git diffthe command without arguments will show changes relative to the index.

These changes should go into the index but have not yet been added.

How can we show the diff details of staged files?

To show the changes in the staged files, we use the git diff command as shown below.

$ git diff --cached

Output:

git diff --cached

We can see that adding the --cached flag to our git git diffcommit command will show the diff details of the staged files. Indeed, the Git documentation states that git commit git diff --cachedwill show the staged changes relative to the current commit ( HEAD ).

What if we don't want to run the commands individually?

To display the difference details of the staged and unstaged changes, run the git diff command as shown below.

$ git diff HEAD

Output:

git diff HEAD

git diff HEADThe command will display the differences between your working directory and the current commit.

hint

If you have trouble reading the diff details above, you can use a third-party diff tool like Meld.

In short, we can manipulate the git diff command to display the difference details of the uncommitted work, depending on the category of the file. We have already seen how to display the difference details of staged and unstaged files in Git.

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