Basic branch diff

With git diff, you can check the difference between two branches. Let’s see it in action in the demo below.

The current branch is main with the history shown below.

$ git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean

$ git log --oneline
bfdb0a5 add version 3
c3f49dc modify notes and add version
1d96512 add notes and metadata

Created a new branch named feature1. While in the new branch, contents of notes were changed, and a commit was made.

$ git switch -c feature1
Switched to a new branch 'feature1'

$ cat notes
version 3

$ echo "version 4" > notes

$ git status
On branch feature1
Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
        modified: notes

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

$ git add notes

$ git commit -m "update notes with v4"
[feature1 f58940f] update notes with v4
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

With git diff, we can see that the full difference between the two branches. The output shows the affected files and the content difference.

$ git diff main..feature1
diff --git a/notes b/notes
index 7170a52..96ac8f8 100644
--- a/notes
+++ b/notes
@@ -1 +1 @@
-version 3
+version 4

--name-only is to only show the names of the files that have differences.

$ git diff --name-only main..feature1
notes

On the other hand, --stat is used here to show the summary.

$ git diff --stat main..feature1
 notes | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)