Git diff showing horrible escape characters

by | Apr 9, 2012 | Technical Blog | 3 comments

Funny little one this…
When running a git diff command I was getting horrible escape characters everywhere. Turns out this is because my terminal was in colour mode – (set up by the server admin) – and this was causing the escape characters.
Simply ran the git diff command with the –no-color option to get the output back to a nice normal diff output.

3 Comments

  1. Judit
    Judit on 17th July 2014 at 1:29 pm

    This command worked for me in several machines:
    ‘export LESS=-R $LESS’
    It will display git diff in colours without strange characters =)

  2. Ali
    Ali on 18th February 2015 at 8:27 am

    Thanks!
    Worked for me on a tcsh shell.
    setenv LESS -R

  3. Dan Farrell
    Dan Farrell on 24th January 2018 at 1:35 am

    Awesome, thanks. Seems as tough some “less” functionality, maybe busybox, was being used in my case (alpine). An install of `less` took care of the problem for me.