Git Tricks with Tri and Difft

26 March 2026

Updated: 26 March 2026

Assumed audience: Developers/technical people who use git and/or enjoy terminal UIs (TUIs)

So I finally got tri running super fast which I already talked about today and I came across something mildly annoying but not all bad so thought it would be nice to write down

I use difft for my git diffs. This works really nicely as it’s got some syntax awareness and integrates really well into other tools I use such as lazygit

Now, I’m a Unix Philosophy dude so I build my tools to do the same - so naturally I wanted to use difft with tri - so, here’s how to do that

The below examples are using Nushell so your shell’s exact syntax may vary but the idea is the same

Terminal window
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git diff HEAD --name-only | GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF="difft --color=always --display=inline" tri --preview `git diff HEAD -- `

Okay, braindump definitely. Realistically, since I want difft to always behave like this, It’s probably worth setting the environment variable elsewhere, but the steps are basically:

  1. Use the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable to have the difft command, this causes git to use the entire command and not just execute the binary provided as with diff.external, so I can provide the flags to format difft as desired
  2. Then just use tri as normal

Assuming you’ve set step 1. within your shell, the command is more simply:

Terminal window
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# step 1.
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$env.GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF = "difft --color=always --display=inline"
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#step 2.
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git diff HEAD --name-only | tri --preview `git diff HEAD -- `

Which is just the normal way that tri works so yay

And that’s it okbye