I'm running git-diff on a file, but the change is at the end of a long line.
If I use cursor keys to move right, it loses colour-coding—and worse the lines don't line up—making it harder to track the change.
Is there a way to prevent that problem or to simply make the lines wrap instead?
I'm running Git 1.5.5 via mingw32.
The display of the output of git diff is handled by whatever pager you are using.
Commonly, under Linux, less would be used.
You can tell git to use a different pager by setting the GIT_PAGER environment variable. If you don't mind about paging (for example, your terminal allows you to scroll back) you might try explicitly setting GIT_PAGER to empty to stop it using a pager. Under Linux:
$ GIT_PAGER='' git diff
Without a pager, the lines will wrap.
If your terminal doesn't support coloured output, you can also turn this off using either the --no-color argument, or putting an entry in the color section of your git config file.
$ GIT_PAGER='' git diff --no-color
Not a perfect solution, but gitk and git-gui can both show this information,
and have scrollbars.
When in trouble, I often resort to DiffMerge. Excellent diff tool that has in-line diff highlighting. Also, in the latest versions they added a mode to have an horizontal mode.
I haven't been able to configure git to use it, though. So I do have to muck around to get both versions of the file first.