When using git diff, you might encounter weird characters where umlauts (or any other UTF-8) characters should be. It looks like this:

R<C3><BC>ckg<C3><A4>ngig # should be "Rückgängig"

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However, not Git is to blame but the less command Show archive.org snapshot that Git uses to page your diff output.

You need to tell less to use UTF-8 (otherwise it tries to convert multibyte chars like "ü" which is represented by 2 bytes C3 and BC).

$ LESSCHARSET=UTF-8 git diff

Doing it like above should fix it for that one command. If you want to persist that setting, say the following.

export LESSCHARSET=UTF-8

Put it into your ~/.bashrc and reopen all terminals (or source ~/.bashrc in open terminals).

Note that if you are having trouble with filenames, you should try changing git's core.precomposeunicode config setting.