drift

A git diff pager that actually wants to be looked at.

drift takes the diff you already know and drops it into a real terminal UI: syntax highlighting, word-level change emphasis, split or unified views, a file-list modal and a live sidebar you can click and drag to resize, jump-to-hunk, in-file search, open-in-$EDITOR, and a live mode that repaints the moment your index or branch moves. Point it at a commit, your staging area, or your working tree, or just pipe a diff into it like any other pager.

No config needed to start. Themes, colors, and keys are all yours to bend later.

Install

Homebrew (macOS, Linux)

brew install aymanbagabas/tap/drift

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add aymanbagabas https://github.com/aymanbagabas/scoop-bucket
scoop install drift

Cargo

cargo install drift-diff

Or grab the prebuilt binary from the GitHub release instead of compiling:

cargo binstall drift-diff

npm

npm install -g @aymanbagabas/drift

Debian / Ubuntu

echo 'deb [trusted=yes] https://repo.aymanbagabas.com/apt/ /' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/aymanbagabas.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install drift

Fedora / RHEL

echo '[aymanbagabas]
name=Ayman Bagabas
baseurl=https://repo.aymanbagabas.com/yum/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0' | sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/aymanbagabas.repo
sudo yum install drift

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S drift-diff-bin

Nix (NUR)

From the Nix User 仓库, install nur.repos.aymanbagabas.drift. Or run it ad-hoc without configuring NUR:

nix-shell -p '(import (fetchTarball "https://github.com/aymanbagabas/nur/archive/master.tar.gz") {}).drift'

Prebuilt binaries

Grab an archive for your platform from the latest release and put the drift binary on your PATH.

Every method installs a drift binary.

Use it

drift                     # working tree vs HEAD
drift -A                  # ...and untracked files too
drift --staged            # what's staged (alias: --cached)
drift HEAD~3              # a single commit
drift main..feature       # a range
drift -w                  # watch the repo and refresh on every change
git diff | drift          # pager mode: read a diff from stdin

Tip

Pair it with an AI agent. Leave drift -w open in a split while an agent (Copilot, Claude, etc.) works, every edit lands on screen instantly. Press w to freeze the view when you want to read, and again to resume.

Make it your default git diff pager:

git config --global pager.diff drift

drift defaults to the ansi theme — your terminal's own colors, with syntax highlighting off. Pick a theme to turn it on, globally via git config:

git config --global drift.theme onedark   # onelight, dracula, nord, gruvbox-dark, ...

Some flags worth knowing:

Flag	What it does
-w, --watch	Refresh when the git index or refs change
-A, --all	Also show untracked files (working-tree view only)
-C, --directory DIR	Run as if started in DIR (worktrees, bare repos)
-c, --config FILE	Use a specific config file
--no-syntax	Turn off syntax highlighting for this run
-U, --context N	Lines of context around each change
--ignore-whitespace	Ignore whitespace-only changes
--diff-algorithm ALGO	myers, minimal, patience, or histogram
-- PATHSPEC...	Limit to paths, e.g. drift -- src/ docs/

Keys

Key	Action
j k / ↑ ↓	Move the cursor
h l / ← →	Scroll horizontally (for lines wider than the view)
0 $	Scroll to line start / end
d u / ^d ^u	Half page down / up
space f ^f / b ^b	Full page down / up
^e ^y	Scroll one line down / up
g G	Top / bottom
H M L	Cursor to screen top / middle / bottom
{ }	Previous / next hunk
[ ] / tab ⇧tab	Previous / next file
/	搜索 the current file (regex, smart-case)
n N	Next / previous match
s	Toggle split view
F	File list modal
B	Toggle the file sidebar
w	Toggle watch mode
V	Start / cancel a line selection; any motion key extends it
y	Copy the selection, or the cursor line when nothing is selected
Y	Copy the whole current file
enter	Expand folded context, or open the file at the cursor
v	Open the current file in $EDITOR
r	Refresh
?	Toggle the help footer
q	Quit

Mouse

drift is fully mouse-driven too:

• Click a file in the sidebar to jump straight to it in the diff.
• Click a file in the file modal to select it; the modal stays open until you click outside it (or press enter).
• Drag the sidebar's divider to resize it, live.
• In split view, drag the divider between the two panes to rebalance them.
• Click the ? help badge in the status bar to toggle the help footer.
• Drag across the diff to select text; it lands on your system clipboard (over SSH too, via OSC 52). In split view the selection stays within one pane, so you copy just the old or just the new side.
• Scroll wheel moves the page through the diff (the cursor stays put until it reaches an edge). Scroll the wheel left/right to pan wide lines horizontally.

Themes

Set theme = "..." in your config, or git config drift.theme .... The default is ansi — your terminal's own 16 colors, with syntax highlighting and word-diff emphasis left off. Any other built-in theme turns highlighting on:

• onedark, onelight
• dracula
• gruvbox-dark, gruvbox-light
• nord
• solarized-dark, solarized-light
• catppuccin-mocha, catppuccin-latte
• tokyonight
• monokai
• ansi — the default: borrows your terminal's own 16 colors so drift matches whatever palette you already run. It leaves code text and word-diff emphasis alone, since 16 colors are too few to layer cleanly over diff colors.

A handful of syntect theme names also work, but only the seven that ship in syntect's default set — InspiredGitHub, Solarized (dark), Solarized (light), base16-eighties.dark, base16-mocha.dark, base16-ocean.dark, and base16-ocean.light. They color the code but won't repaint the UI chrome to match, and (Solarized aside) the built-ins above already cover them with matching chrome. Any other theme name — a custom .tmTheme, or a syntect theme not in that set — silently falls back to onedark.

The themes/ directory has a full, commented config for every built-in theme. Copy one and go:

mkdir -p ~/.config/drift
cp themes/dracula.toml ~/.config/drift/config.toml

Config

drift looks for a config file, in order, at:

• $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/drift/config.{toml,yaml,yml,json}
• ~/.config/drift/config.{toml,yaml,yml,json}
• ~/.drift.toml

TOML, YAML, and JSON all work. The top-level knobs:

theme         = "onedark"   # any built-in or syntect theme name
syntax        = true        # highlight diff content
intraline     = true        # word-level change emphasis
line-numbers  = true        # old/new line-number gutter
tab-width     = 4
editor        = ""          # falls back to $VISUAL, then $EDITOR, then vi
sidebar       = "auto"      # "auto" (opens at width >= 150), "always", or "never"
sidebar-width = 30          # sidebar columns; drag its divider to resize live
sidebar-side  = "left"      # "left" or "right"

Colors come in two layers. [colors] is a named palette; [styles] maps UI components to a fg bg attrs... spec resolved against that palette. Every color token accepts a palette name, a literal #rrggbb, a 0-255 index, an ANSI color name, or default/none/- for the terminal's own color. See any file in themes/ for the full set with comments.

From git config

Anything you can set in a config file, you can set in git config under the drift section, which is handy for per-repo overrides. Colors and styles go in colors and styles subsections. Git forbids _ in a key, so a field like add_emph becomes add-emph:

git config drift.theme nord
git config drift.line-numbers false
git config drift.colors.add '#00ff00'
git config drift.colors.add-emph '#003300'
git config drift.styles.statusbar 'foreground surface bold'

Or in ~/.gitconfig directly:

[drift]
    theme = nord
    line-numbers = false
[drift "colors"]
    add = "#00ff00"
    add-emph = "#003300"
[drift "styles"]
    statusbar = "foreground surface bold"

For the full list of every setting, color, component style, and flag, see CONFIG.md.

Built with

drift's terminal UI is powered by uncurses, and its multi-channel releases are cut with GoReleaser.

License

MIT