Not sure if this is in general the git thing or gitlab, but I don't like it highlighted a rather long sub-section of a long continuous string in deeper colour including parts that were not changed when only some characters are changed in the string.
Is there a way to configure gitlab not to do this? i.e. just highlights those characters updated only
e.g. this is what I got on gitlab 8.10
and I expect it to hightlight only the '2' between 't' and 'i' and highlight the 'g' between 'm' and 'a'
This feature was introduced in Gitlab 8.10 (see section "Inline Diffs").
git itself uses line-based diffs, so it will internally always store the complete changed lines. However, git tools also allow to visually highlight only those changed parts, e.g. with git diff --word-diff=color.
Edit
What Gitlab 8.10 introduces are additional highlights in changed lines. I.e. the complete changed lines will be highlighted with a light green/red, and the actual changes within a line will be highlighted with a darker green/red. This is what you see in your figure:
and in the figure of Gitlab's release notes:
Apparently, Gitlab highlights the largest part of the line that contains any changes. It does not try to produce minimal changes, probably due to performance reasons.
The git --word-diff=color option (including gitk's Markup words and Color words setting) do produce fewer highlights. Compare Gitlab's diff:
with the same diff from gitk:
However, even --word-diff=color will—as the name suggests—only highlight on a word-by-word basis. For your example, it will simply highlight both words. Here is your case reproduced in gitk with Color words:
For the command line tools (e.g. git diff), there is actually an option --color-words=. that will do what you want:
However, neither gitk nor Gitlab know this option, as far as I know.
