From: Junio C Hamano Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2015 16:33:52 GMT Subject: Re: Get a git diff without taking index into account Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Eric Frederich writes: > This is from "git help diff". It seems to imply that I should be able to do it. > It mentions nothing of the index. Most of the documentation on early subcommands (and "git diff" certainly is one of the early subcommands) were written back when everybody knew that Git almost always talks about _tracked_ files that are known to the index, and the only time it even cares about untracked ones that are not in the index was when it tries to help users by reminding what the user may have forgot to "git add". Documentation pages do not bother repeating "this only looks at tracked paths" for this reason; Git is about tracked files by default. Perhaps you can suggest how to improve the description of commands without being too repetitive? Thanks.