Bugs and limitations There is always the possibility of colour selections (either the defaults or those chosen by a user) will result in output where the text 'disappears', because the foreground and background colours are the same. There is no way to detect terminal colours and so this is always a danger. See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=368973 - The standard workaround is to choose either colordiffrc or colordiffrc-lightbg, as appropriate for the colour scheme in use. Colourising of 'wdiff' output requires that the '-n' option is given, i.e. 'wdiff -n', which avoids spanning the end of line while showing deleted or inserted text. See 'man wdiff'