gvc (Git Visual Compare)

The ease of a visual diff viewer, the power of a command-line diffing tool.

gvc is a lightweight macOS GUI for viewing git diff output. Run gvc where you’d normally run git diff — it opens a native window displaying a formatted, scrollable, searchable diff. It was built as a modern replacement for GitX’s --diff mode, which served gvc’s author faithfully for over a decade but lacked dark mode, find, and active maintenance.

Screenshot of gvc, showing a diff in dark mode

Why Another Diff Tool?

Most visual diff tools fall into one of two camps: GUI diff apps limited to looking at a single commit at a time, or advanced TUI diff tools supporting commit ranges and per-file filtering that are nevertheless trapped inside a small terminal window. gvc fills the gap — it’s a CLI-driven GUI. You type a CLI diff command — with as many bells and whistles as you want — and a full GUI window appears.

Full git diff passthrough — anything you can pass to git diff, you can pass to gvc.
Lightweight — not a heavy Electron app, not a TUI. Uses a platform-native WebView (WKWebView) to display diffs.
Free and open source — no subscriptions, no accounts.

Features

Light and dark mode
Find (Cmd+F)
Adjustable font size (Cmd+Plus / Cmd+Minus)
Table of contents to jump to any file
Collapsible file sections with expand/collapse all

Installation

Requires Python 3.14+ and a working git installation.

# Install pipx first
python3 -m pip install pipx

# Install gvc
pipx install gvc

After installation, gvc is available as a command in your shell.

Usage

gvc takes the same arguments as git diff:

gvc                              # Working tree changes (unstaged)
gvc --cached                     # Staged changes
gvc HEAD~1 HEAD                  # Compare two commits
gvc abc123 def456                # Compare any two refs
gvc HEAD~3 HEAD -- src/foo.py    # Limit to specific files
gvc -w HEAD~1 HEAD               # Ignore whitespace
gvc -U20 HEAD~1 HEAD             # 20 lines of context

Each invocation opens a new window. The CLI returns immediately — your terminal is not blocked.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+F	Open find bar
Cmd+G	Find next
Shift+Cmd+G	Find previous
Cmd+Plus	Increase font size
Cmd+Minus	Decrease font size
Cmd+W	Close window
Cmd+Q	Quit application