Updated on June 28th, 2022 in #dev-environment

git diff --staged Will Diff Files You've Staged vs What's Commit

It compares uncommitted changes vs your latest commmit, --cached does the same thing, it's an alias to --staged.

Quick Jump: Demo Video

I use git diff a lot in my day to day.

Sometimes I want to see a diff of changes I’ve already staged using git add -p vs the latest commit. For that you can use git diff --staged or git diff --cached.

The official git diff documentation mentions:

–staged is a synonym of –cached

I prefer the --staged flag since it’s more descriptive of what the command does based on it being related to changes or files you’ve staged. Based on the doc’s wording it sounds like --staged was added at a later time.

The video below goes over using this command:

Demo Video

Timestamps

• 0:11 – Going over the example repo
• 0:49 – Using git diff without any flags when you staged changes
• 1:23 – Using the –staged flag to see a diff of staged changes
• 1:56 – There’s also the –cached flag which does the same thing
• 2:50 – Do you prefer using –staged or –cached?

Reference Links

• https://github.com/mhinz/vim-signify

Do you use --staged or --cached? Let me know below.