Update June 2012 (2 and an half years later):
This (comparing directories instead of file-by-file) seems to be soon available:
See [ANNOUNCE] Git 1.7.11.rc1:
“
git difftool” learned the “--dir-diff” option to spawn external diff tools that can compare two directory hierarchies at a time after populating two temporary directories, instead of running an instance of the external tool once per a file pair.
See “Patch difftool: teach difftool to handle directory diffs“
Original answer (January 2010)
One could pull a copy of the changed files from staging/checked in files into a temp folder, and then open that up. Is that the only option?
Basically yes:
You difftool script would:
- create 2 temp directories
- defines itself as a diff tool
- call git diff
- which then call itself for file to diff
- in that mode, the same script, for each files, only copy the two version to diff in the two temp directories
- then go on and call diff tools (like beyondCompare or WinMerge) on the two temp directories
You have one first example in this question.