How to show uncommitted changes in Git and some Git diffs in detail

How to show uncommitted changes in Git

The command you are looking for is git diff.

git diff - Show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc

Here are some of the options it expose which you can use

git diff (no parameters)
Print out differences between your working directory and the index.

git diff --cached:
Print out differences between the index and HEAD (current commit).

git diff HEAD:
Print out differences between your working directory and the HEAD.

git diff --name-only
Show only names of changed files.

git diff --name-status
Show only names and status of changed files.

git diff --color-words
Word by word diff instead of line by line.

Here is a sample of the output for git diff --color-words:

You have already staged the changes (presumably by running git add), so in order to get their diff, you need to run:

git diff --cached

(A plain git diff will only show unstaged changes.)

For example:

For me, the only thing which worked is

git diff HEAD

including the staged files, git diff --cached only shows staged files.

I had a situation of git status showing changes, but git diff printing nothing, although there were changes in several lines. However:

$ git diff data.txt > myfile
$ cat myfile
<prints diff>

Git 2.20.1 on raspbian. Other commands like git checkout, git pull are printing to stdout without problems.