// the find
holman/spaceman-diff
diff images from the command line
A shell script that hooks into git-diff to render ASCII approximations of changed images directly in the terminal, using jp2a and ImageMagick under the hood. Solves the specific annoyance of having to open an external viewer just to sanity-check an image commit. Niche, but it genuinely works for what it claims.
Integrates cleanly with git's external diff driver mechanism — no patching git, just a gitattributes entry. The file size delta output is actually the most useful part: catching an accidental 20MB PNG commit in a terminal workflow is real value. Ships with a test suite and sample images, which is more than most shell utility repos bother with. Brew-installable, so the setup story on macOS is one command.
Dead since 2019 — jp2a hasn't kept pace and ImageMagick's CLI flags shift between versions, so there's a real chance this just silently fails on current systems. The ASCII rendering quality is whatever jp2a produces, which is passable for sanity-checking but not for evaluating actual visual changes. Can't handle add-only or delete-only image diffs — git simply doesn't invoke the external diff driver in those cases, and the README acknowledges no fix is coming. 476 stars, 13 forks, zero recent maintenance: adopt it knowing you may need to debug it yourself.