Git diff -w ignore whitespace only at start & end of lines

Question

I love to use git diff -w to ignore whitespace differences. But, I just noticed that it ignores even whitespace differences in the middle of lines. How could I only ignore whitespace differences that come at the start (^) or end ($) of lines?

Answer 1

For end of line use:

git diff --ignore-space-at-eol

Instead of what are you using currently:

git diff -w (--ignore-all-space)

For start of line... you are out of luck if you want a built in solution.

However, if you don't mind getting your hands dirty there's a rather old patch floating out there somewhere that adds support for "--ignore-space-at-sol".

Answer 2

This is an old question, but is still regularly viewed/needed. I want to post to caution readers like me that whitespace as mentioned in the OP's question is not the same as Regex's definition, to include newlines, tabs, and space characters -- Git asks you to be explicit. See some options here: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration

As stated, git diff -b or git diff --ignore-space-change will ignore spaces at line ends. If you desire that setting to be your default behavior, the following line adds that intent to your .gitconfig file, so it will always ignore the space at line ends:

git config --global core.whitespace trailing-space

In my case, I found this question because I was interested in ignoring "carriage return whitespace differences", so I needed this:

git diff --ignore-cr-at-eol or git config --global core.whitespace cr-at-eol from here.

You can also make it the default only for that repo by omitting the --global parameter, and checking in the settings file for that repo. For the CR problem I faced, it goes away after check-in if warncrlf or autocrlf = true in the [core] section of the .gitconfig file.