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A git diff with all changed and new unstaged files

Page created: 2026-03-28

When reviewing what I’m about to commit, I want to see a colorful diff of my changes including the new files I’m adding to the repo which have never been committed before.

Annoyingly, git only shows changes to existing files, so to review all of my code, I have to manually open all new files. This has been an irritation of mine for years. I finally did something about it today.

Behold, my "review" diff, a small Bash script:

#!/bin/bash

# Show changed *and new* unstaged files in diff.

TEMPFILE='/tmp/gdiff.ansi'

# Normal diff, force control seq. colors to temp file
git diff --color HEAD > $TEMPFILE

# Loop through all *new* files
for FILE in $(git ls-files --others --exclude-standard)
do
    # Append to temp file.
    # Compare with /dev/null or no changes to show.
    git diff --color /dev/null $FILE >> $TEMPFILE
done

# -R ("raw") allows control sequences through to tty
less -R $TEMPFILE

As you can see, the "magic" parts are using git ls-files --others --exclude-standard to list new, untracked files and diffing them with /dev/null so that the entire file is styled as new, added lines.

Explanation of options from man git-ls-files:

   -o, --others
       Show other (i.e. untracked) files in the output

   --exclude-standard
       Add the standard Git exclusions: .git/info/exclude, .gitignore in each
       directory, and the user's global exclusion file.

I already had the aliases s='git status' and d='git diff' since I use these commands so often, so I replaced d with this script and I only wish I’d done it sooner!