Special characters escaping (or otherwise rendering incorrectly)

[JodiWarren]

When diffing

$ delta test1.txt test2.txt

- hello world
+ hello jodi

I get the following output:

^[[38;5;88m  1 ⋮^[[38;5;28m    │^[[48;2;63;0;1mhello ^[[48;2;144;16;17mworld^[[48;2;63;0;1m^[[0K
^[[38;5;88m    ⋮^[[38;5;28m  1 │^[[48;2;0;40;0;38;2;248;248;242mhello ^[[48;2;0;96;0mjodi^[[48;2;0;40;0m^[[0K

I'm not entirely sure what could be causing this. I've just installed Delta via homebrew on OSX and have set it up with the suggested simple config. I've installed the latest version of less as suggested. I've experienced this in both Terminal and iTerm2.

For contrast, $ bat test1.txt outputs:

───────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File: test1.txt
───────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1   │ hello world
───────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

[bew]

Can you try $ LESS="-r" delta test1.txt test2.txt ?
Also, which version of less do you have?

[JodiWarren]

Hi @bew , thanks so much for taking a look.

LESS="-r" delta test1.txt test2.txt gets me the same results as my initial post, unfortunately.

I'm using less 590 (installed via homebrew), and I have double checked that the system is using that version.

[dandavison]

@JodiWarren if you don't use a pager, does everything display correctly? E.g. delta --paging=never

If so, then what about piping that output into less explicitly: e.g. git log -p | delta | /path/to/correct/version/of/less -R?

Incidentally, if you ever want to double check the less that git is picking up, you can do strange tricks like this (here telling git to run which less instead of the pager)

git -c core.pager='which less' show

[JodiWarren]

@dandavison

delta --paging=never works perfectly:

$ delta test1.txt test2.txt --paging=never

Δ test1.txt ⟶   test2.txt
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

─────┐
• 1: │
─────┘
  1 ⋮    │hello world
    ⋮  1 │hello jodi

git log -p | delta | less -R also works perfectly, as does excluding the -R flag. git log -p | delta has the same issue as my original post unfortunately. So it looks like there's something up with the way that delta is interfacing with my local version of less