Ability to output to a file with colours included?

[tom0010]

As the title says really, is this possible to do?
I tried redirecting to a file > output.txt but because delta uses colours it doesn't render properly.
Maybe the possibility to render to a pdf?

[dandavison]

Hey @tom0010. Delta produces colours as ANSI sequences that are understood by terminal emulators. I think the best way to do this would be to convert the ANSI sequences to HTML color codes and open the resulting file in a web browser, and then e.g. print to PDF. I just got that to work; you might want to play with the options a bit (ansifilter can't handle things like decoration boxes and hyperlinks so the options I added are disabling them):

First install ansifilter (for me on MacOS that is brew install ansifilter). Then

git show \
    | delta --no-gitconfig --file-decoration-style blue --hunk-header-decoration-style blue \
    | ansifilter --html \
    > /tmp/diff.html

Now open /tmp/diff.html in a web browser:

[tom0010]

Thanks @dandavison, where this does give me a html page with the diff. The colours are all messed up, here is an example attached.

I seem to be able to get around this when I pass --light. Guessing because my default is a dark terminal.

[dandavison]

OK thanks, yeah I guess I have an env var set telling delta to use a light theme, despite the fact I supplied --no-gitconfig. And that happened to do the right thing because for display in a web browser that is going to be a light background by default!

[tom0010]

Just coming back to this, I normally use --side-by-side when we use the ansifilter, it adds extra special chars, so the HTML doesn't really look that great.

[tom0010]

Furthermore, the HTML page that it generates is double the size of a vimdiff to html.
I am wondering if we could pass delta into vimdiff somehow?

Here's the command I'm using to generate a vimdiff:
vimdiff file1.cfg file2.cfg -c TOhtml -c 'w! diff.html' -c 'qa!'

Delta looks a lot more appealing than vimdiff, I've tried multiple colour schemes with vim and none seem to be that great, I ended up landing on gruvbox in dark mode, which seems ok.

@dandavison