Side-by-side Git View

[spkgyk]

It would be nice to see changes side-by-side instead of vertically, with differences highlighted. For example, if I change a variable name from addtwonumbers to addTwoNumbers, the T and the N would be highlighted.

VS Code does something similar, and I think it provides a very easy viewing experience. As with vim, you could switch from the left buffer and right buffer with ctrl-w-h and ctrl-w-l.

The highlighting isn't that clear with vs code, but the side-by-side view is very nice to see. It means I can edit code in the git diff viewer, and see the changes to the original code in real time.

[Joride]

Xcode does a similar thing, and allows jumping from one change to the next with the up and down arrows, by clicking the divider between the views.
Very, very useful when going over any leftovers/remnants of a debugging session before committing.

[kotkoroid]

I've been trying the current implementation for weeks, but I haven't found it to be more useful or clearer than the VS Code version, especially for comparing staged files and resolving Git conflicts. Have you considered opening an issue? I wasn't able to find one.

[raul-gherman]

I second this request

[sporritt]

I'd vote for this too. Having just come across Zed I think it looks great, but the diff view pales in comparison with the side-by-side that I'm used to in IntelliJ.

[ArturAronov]

This feature would be a great addition. Coming from VSCode, this is something that I miss a lot...

[remorses]

This is one of the most important features for me

[widersky]

Just copy-paste IntelliJ implementation, it's the best out there.

[Trosterud]

it's so good every time I try to switch away from the editor I keep going back to the git view before pushing

[sporritt]

Me too. And then there's also changelists...

[stychu]

Exactly. The points which make me keep using inteliij 😩😩😩 Dev team. Please copy onteliij git handling and u automatically get huge userbase

[symph-antonio]

Very true. It's the best out there right now. I keep coming back to it for reviewing changes.

[westykid]

I am using Zed to code (on one screen) and intellij to diff on the other with the same source. Their implementation is just - the BEST - end of.

[Imamsubekti26]

I think this is a duplicate with this #4523

[remorses]

nope, completely different, this issue is for deletions and additions to be in separate panes to make it easier to read

[bkgthumanity]

Yup this is my number one missing feature. The over and above git view is really hard to get the context of the changes particular if they are more extensive. A side by side diff view where you can easily see the new file vs the old file (with changes highlighted) is so much easier to read. (It also works better when working with LLM's too as it's easier to copy past new and old files... to put into an llm).

[lasfito]

bumping this as i just switched to zed and this is currently one of my main struggles

[matthieusieben]

Also, add a panel that allows to choose what to compare with:

• HEAD
• main branch
• main branch (on remote)
• arbitrary branch

see #31961

[zhe]

It would be very helpful to support the option of Ignore Trim Whitespace.

(seen in VS Code under Settings > Text Editor > Diff Editor)

[LeoLionel]

Same here: Not having a side by side view for git changes is the one feature I am missing to fully switch over to Zed.

[ghb-enzian]

I am alsao having this issue. Especially I do not want to make the agent changes and then bulk view but I want to stay in 'ask' mode and then 'generate' a diff per 'parts' I copy into the editor and inspect the diff.

[swaroop0210]

yeah i feels like i get used to so much seeing the diff side by side in vs code. a little bit trouble viewing it vertically. of course a skill issue though.

[kotkoroid]

You can climb up the mountain using hands only, but why would you do that if you can use legs.

[kmatt]

Is it possible to use an external pager with Zed?

While waiting for a built-in, https://github.com/dandavison/delta does a good side-by-side diff presentation.

[reslear]

or https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

[lionel-]

You can launch a cli app like lazygit in a task and configure it to use delta. See #8665 (comment) for discussions on integrating lazygit in zed, and https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit/blob/master/docs/Custom_Pagers.md#delta for using Delta as pager.

[Gustavo-maia-gst]

OMG, this looks awesome

[symph-antonio]

Jetbrains Git Diff is the best. My teammates are having a hard time resolving conflicts using VSCode/Cursor diff while it doesn't take me 10 seconds to resolve it cause the changes are very easy to spot. Plus the magic button is goated. If it can be brought over to Zed, i'll definitely switch over. haha

[FNDEVVE]

The only reason why I haven't switched to it over WebStorm, I love how snappy Zed is.

[gustavotrott]

Just feels like trying to coerce the engineers to implement their feature.

why not? In our team we actually appreciate when customers point out what they miss most, because it helps us prioritize. The more users engage with the platform, the better. It’s much more useful when people tell us what they want than when we try to predict it and risk building things nobody cares about.

[somtooo]

Just feels like trying to coerce the engineers to implement their feature.

why not? In our team we actually appreciate when customers point out what they miss most, because it helps us prioritize. The more users engage with the platform, the better. It’s much more useful when people tell us what they want than when we try to predict it and risk building things nobody cares about.

Yeah I agree here my not trying to argue on this 🤣 it was just an emotional statement. I just feel like some of these people still won't switch. They would find another intellij feature that they like. For me a really big one is lack of db integration but I've sacrificed that cause intellij lags too much ND their ai integration is dog poop

[FNDEVVE]

I'm sorry you're tired lil bro, if these comments affect you maybe you shouldn't spend your Sunday on GH?

Lol if this feature ever lands I want to see you use zed daily and nothing else

Bro, Listen, Mate, that would be breathtaking and I'd love to try

[infi-pc]

The same here, but yeah, to be honest, when this feature lands, I will definitely give Zed a second try and see if I am still missing something; maybe there will be a third or fourth try.

But watching this with high hope.

[LivioGama]

Don't worry, they are aware

[LivioGama]

🤯 Thank me for my sacrifice 😅

[patkepa]

Nice! How much work would you say, until you'd deem that feature ready? Can't wait to test it!

[LivioGama]

It's hard to say, especially since Claude Sonnet 4.5 released, it's +500% getting faster.
But at least what I can say is that very soon, I'll update the pull request with what I have, and any help (even from vibe coders - but developers still) will be welcome so we end this the earliest possible, and also because I spend wayyyy too much money alone on LLM for this :D
I am hoping updating/releasing the PR before the end of the week.

[maxbrunsfeld]

@LivioGama Nice work. Are you up for pairing with someone from the Zed team on this? If so, you could pick a time on my calendar here.

[LivioGama]

@maxbrunsfeld thanks for proposing! I actually have no one so with pleasure, I'll book a slot. Struggled a bit, I absolutely wanted to integrate as much Zed stuffs as possible (for example the Zed editors) to make it the less out of reach possible. But now I can say it. TODAY is THE DAY. I'll open my PR as an 'introduction' based on this contributing guideline:

If you are making a larger change, or need advice on how to finish the change
you're making, please open the PR early. We would love to help you get
things right, and it's often easier to see how to solve a problem before the
diff gets too big.

But it doesn't make any doubt that I will NOT be able to conduct this to the end.

[LivioGama]

@maxbrunsfeld I'm so sorry I missed out slot, I'm so sick I'm in bed since saturday. Raincheck to when I feel better

[videni]

The side-by-side diff is truly the most effective way to resolve conflicts currently. Please speed up the release a bit.

[draylegend]

for me, definitely

[njourdane]

Please speed up the release a bit.

I really, really want this feature too, but please be gentle with volunteers who works on this for free, they don't deserve to be put on pressure like this.

[sharppaul]

If you want faster development of features like this, please consider contributing yourself.

[LivioGama]

TODAY is THE DAY. I'll open my PR as an 'introduction' based on this contributing guideline:

"That day" was not the day, but I have an excuse 😉
(Feel free to TLDR this to the end)

💥 Yesterday, I lost code.

Not the whole project — no.
But a critical chunk: the five key features I’ve been sweating over for the past two days, built on top of a month of work (not full time).
I was done. Just needed to push and open my PR for this side-by-side Git diff viewer in Rust, built inside the Zed IDE and its young custom UI framework.

Features that were hard to generate.
The kind of code that even GPT-5 Codex takes 7 minutes per prompt to produce.
As for Claude Sonnet 4.5 — you can ask him fifteen different ways; he just doesn’t get it.
Let’s not even talk about the others.

Then, at the worst possible moment — POOF! Gone.
Not a git reset.
Not human error.
Just an incomprehensible IDE bug (IntelliJ), unrelated to anything I did, that wiped my changes.
I wasn’t even in that project window when it happened.

Being a senior dev, I had my safety nets.
Two git shelves, created at key moments.
My critical changes? Not there.
Even though I made those shelves specifically for that reason.

So… last resort: JetBrains Local History.
Error message. Database corrupted and deleted.
Ouch.

Cursor’s local “timeline” history?
You can only open one file at a time — so basically useless.

Time to face it… redo everything? Impossible.
I couldn’t even regenerate a fraction of one of those five features.

Despair.

But as developers, our job is to find solutions.

So I turned to Warp — to delegate the use of a few third-party tools designed to export complete Cursor chats (since Cursor only supports single-chat export natively).
All of them failed.

Wait a minute… am I losing it?
Why am I doing this when I have Warp? 🤔

“Recover all my Cursor chats, and the Cursor local history (uselessly limited to one file at a time), from just before 11:40 — the time of the disaster.” (some of the good code have to be mentioned among Cursor Claude Sonnet countless failures).

Warp is an agentic terminal.
And as I often say about it:

“If you give Warp a mission that’s theoretically possible, it will accomplish it.”

It has access to every command-line tool in existence.
Can’t browse the internet?
Well… actually, yes — via curl and wget. 😏

Of course, it nailed it.
Then I handed everything to Claude Sonnet 4.5, who knew exactly what I’d been trying to rebuild for hours and already gave up on the data retrieval.

And I’ll admit — I had that little “wow” moment.

A striking reminder that persistence and creativity combined can unlock the impossible. 🔥

But TODAY, I have a solution 😁
#40014

Let's finish this intro, together

[remorses]

I created a cli to show a split diff view in Zed using a task and a keymap. It looks very close to the GitHub desktop diff viewer, with split diff support and word highlights

// ~/.config/zed/tasks.json
[
  {
    "label": "Critique",
    "command": "bunx critique --watch",
    "shell": {
      "program": "sh"
    },
    "hide": "on_success",
    "reveal_target": "center",
    "show_summary": false,
    "show_command": false,
    "allow_concurrent_runs": false,
    "reveal": "always",
    "use_new_terminal": true
  }
]

// ~/.config/zed/keymap.json
{
  "bindings": {
    "cmd-shift-g": [
      "task::Spawn",
      { "task_name": "Critique", "reveal_target": "center" }
    ]
  }
}

[LivioGama]

I don't like it. I find it very ugly.

[aaronang]

I explored a couple of options in Figma and here are a couple of design decisions that I've been thinking through.

Should lines still show a highlight on the left side?

In Concept A1, you can see that there are bright red and green highlighted bars on the left of each added or deleted line. A potential advantage of this approach is that it is perhaps easier to scan for changes. I don't have the full context of what the intentions are for these bars so input from the Zed team would be helpful here.

In Concept B1, you can see how it would look like without the highlighted/accent bars. It's less noisy in a way.

Concept A1: Keep highlighted/accent bars

Concept B1: No highlighted/accent bars

When should indentation lines be displayed?

In a side-by-side Git view, the left side will have blank lines as the right side will show added lines. The question then becomes whether we should show indentation lines in the blank lines. I'm leaning towards hiding the indentation lines when a greyed out blank line is shown, see Concept A2.

Concept A2: Only show indentation for lines with code

Concept B2: Show indentation for blank lines

Please let me know if this helpful at all. I'm super curious to hear everyone's thoughts on this!

[maxbrunsfeld]

I do find this helpful to see. @LivioGama Personally, I like the visual simplicity of just having blank lines + horizontal alignment, like @aaronang depicted here, as opposed to the bezier curve thing. I find it to be a more calm, less visually-busy presentation than the approach where we allow the two sides to diverge, with the bezier curves connecting them. I think that you could still add revert buttons to this approach. Curious what your reaction is to that.

[somtooo]

I find it to be a more calm, less visually-busy presentation than the approach where we allow the two sides to diverge, with the bezier curves connecting them

The problem is this is one of the main reasons people like intellij diff. Yeah you can add revert buttons and merge buttons but its less intuitive what goes where or what will get replaced. And with no spaces especially on the right hand side the code reads normally. In the pic below for vscode you just have wierd gaps. Also the pane specific scrolling is just nice. Intellij really nailed this one. See

dax

@thdxr
so based off my research into diffs i've learned people will sell their first born in exchange for intellij diffs. I guess we building intellij diffs.

Its more beautiful to read the current state of the file(right hand side) in intellij(left pic) than vscode(right pic)

[somtooo]

I suspect a good amount of zed user's still hang on to their intellij subscription just to resolve merge conflicts.

[anilzeybek]

never realized how much I needed these IntelliJ-style diffs, the difference is night and day in my opinion.

in VS Code, it’s often unclear what was deleted or replaced, but IntelliJ’s curved diff lines make it instantly obvious.

[LivioGama]

I suspect a good amount of zed user's still hang on to their intellij subscription just to resolve merge conflicts.

That includes me 🥹

[somtooo]

ok making big changes with agent and this top down gif is really annoying lol. Need some intellij git diff to properly review agent work @LivioGama get well soon

[LivioGama]

I'm actually not that bad, the discussion and the features continued / are continuing in the PR #40014
I also added recently the revert chunk feature

[LivioGama]

I unfortunately have to disappear for 1 month for this once in a life time japan trip. @somtooo you seem to be the natural candidate and advocate to take over the topic in the PR and maybe with @maxbrunsfeld you can move things on. At least in term of decisions and scope discussion.

Otherwise take care everyone and I'll see you soon!
Mata ne!

[somtooo]

Lmao don't worry the pr I opened to add /response for the copilot provider is still open. 1 month is not a long time 🤣 we will wait for you

[aaronang]

I had some time today to explore curved connectors and how hunks can be staged or reverted.

Concept A: Curved connectors

Concept B: Simple

Since there is quite a debate between both concepts, I'm thinking about how user research could help inform the decision. I'll need more time to think about it though. I'm curious to hear what you all think.

[somtooo]

You keep saying majority but most people agree intellij has the best diffs, not GitHub and not vscode

[rustyrazorblade]

Love the curved connectors!

[njourdane]

Is it so complicated to have an option for that? Like git-diff-viewer: [curved|straight|...]

[Yves852]

I personally prefer B with scroll sync. Probably because of VS Code. Yeah I'm not part of the Elite sorry.

[hrasekj]

I like the A variant, because i am using Sublime merge. If the A variant does not "move" the chunks on scroll, it will not be readable.

But if it is possible to have both variants configurable. That would be awesome 👍

Here is some context for variant A:
#26770 (comment)

[lionel-]

I have one question for intellij users. With the curved connector approach, how do you deal with diffs with large insertions? doesn't that make it hard to compare side by side, given that the code in each version is now at completely different places?

Do you just switch to the unified view in that case? But what if parts of the code are better examined with the unified view, and parts are more appropriate for side by side. Once you're past the large insertions, you can no longer compare side by side with the intellij approach for the rest of the file, right? Or am I missing something?

[tesmond]

I don’t use IntelliJ, however, I suspect the design decisions of the tool can impact your coding approach. Such a diff style might move you towards putting new functions at the bottom of a file rather than near related functions or making new function calls rather than blocks of code within existing functions.

I am certain though that either version would be superior to what is available now.

[MaxRieger96]

The views do not scroll at the same speed. So if there are many more lines on the right, and you scroll down, only the right side scrolls until the equal lines are aligned again.

[somtooo]

Yeah @MaxRieger96 is correct. Right side and left side views don't scroll at the same speed it's lovely

[ghb-enzian]

Maybe one could optimize for "speed of execution" and then potentially 'generalize / theme it '? Presumably, most of us at this point want some feature of this sort and are then looking forward for any form of *evolution*.

…

On Fri, Oct 24, 2025 at 12:04 PM Somtoo Chukwurah ***@***.***> wrote: You keep saying majority but most people agree intellij has the best diffs, not GitHub and not vscode — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#26770 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/BQPHSL2UG2UKAXMDMFXSF2T3ZH2SDAVCNFSM6AAAAABZAMRUSSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTINZXGEZTCMI> . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[somtooo]

You need to look at the pr opened for this feature, It's already intellij aligned. Your assumption that an intellij implementation is way more work than a vscode/GitHub implementation is probably incorrect.

[tehtorq]

Just going to add again that I understand intellij users like this approach with curved lines and panels that scroll at different speeds, but its going to cause friction for those who are not intellij users and are used to working with the version which seems pretty common across VS Code and Github (which again I believe to be a larger marketshare of users overall).

To me personally, it seems like the UI can be distracting because its drawing more and includes more diagonality, and the varying scroll speeds of left vs right is not something I personally am looking for.

[somtooo]

Correct that vscode guys are the largest market share but yet we have overwhelming support for intellij style diffs - it is possible to use a tool and know that a feature of that tool can be better.

[tehtorq]

Correct that vscode guys are the largest market share but yet we have overwhelming support for intellij style diffs - it is possible to use a tool and know that a feature of that tool can be better.

What I'm trying to say politely is that if it was definitively better, it would already be the standard used by the wider market. It's not a new concept - its been around for decades. There's a reason its not the most prominent way to present diffs. I believe it should be an opt-in, not the standard.

[somtooo]

Yeah I understand where you coming from. But the truth really is none is even good. In the age of agents reviewing should be improved.

[yiv]

I've migrated 90% of my coding work from JetBrains to Zed, but when we have a lot of commits and merges with many conflicts, I have to go back to JetBrains to reopen the project.

[rodrii-dp]

Is there any update on this?

[somtooo]

Lmao is this a joke. Cause they don’t mean side by side diff view lol

[gustavotrott]

You’re right 🤣 I got so excited when I saw “side-by-side” that I completely missed the rest, lol.

[ojpro]

Side-by-Side diff is on the current phase of Lets Git Together

https://zed.dev/channel/git-1-0-25944/notes

[davidpmccormick]

The project details of the Git together project board also give me hope

[njourdane]

It's worth to mention that this present issue is not included in the Let's Git Together project board.
So maybe they want to improve / stabilize git support before to include fancy side-by-side git view.