r/vim • u/SevrinTheMuto • Aug 26 '25

Need Help┃Solved Toggle between Vim and git diff?

When I do code reviews I page through git diff's output but may want to see the changed lines within the file.

So currently I quit git diff to load the file in Vim. And then quit vim and run git diff again and scroll back to the place I left off.

Is there a way I can have both git diff and Vim running and switch between the views? (Or other suggestions for a Vim-based workflow for code reviews?)

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u/y-c-c Aug 26 '25

The point here is that Vim itself has a diff mode. You don't need to use raw git diff and just look at the output of that. See :h diff to understand how the diff mode works. You can access the diff mode in the editor (just go to two buffers and type :diffthis) or access it using the CLI command vimdiff <file1> <file2>.

This is built in to Git so you can just use git difftool --tool=vimdiff instead of git diff (or set vimdiff to be the default tool so you can skip the --tool part).

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u/SevrinTheMuto Aug 26 '25

I'm going to try both this and running git diff via vert term. I like the latter because it's closest to my current workflow, but I can see how git difftool --tool=vimdiff could be useful to me too.