After upgrading my Ubuntu 13.10 installation to 14.04, I noticed that the output of several git commands (e.g. git diff and git log) didn’t show colours as they used to, but showed ESC[ ANSI codes instead.
A quick internet search lead to this post on unix.stackexchange.com where the LESS environment variable was ‘blamed’. Indeed, I have my LESS variable (re-) defined in my .bashrc and .zshrc files.
The solution was to add -R to the environment variable, which allows raw control characters to be displayed. I now have the environment variable defined as:
LESS='--quiet -X -F -R' |
Thank you, I also had this issue after upgrading to 14.04.