diffr

Overview

Reviewing changes involves reading diffs. Sometimes, a line-oriented presentation of changes is not precise enough, especially when changes involve long lines or very similar consecutive lines.

This program processes such diffs, and output them (in the console) with additional diff information on top of the unified diff format, using text attributes.

It works hunk by hunk, recomputing the diff on a word-by-word basis.

The current implementation uses Myers longest common subsequence algorithm.

Screenshots

Installation

Arch Linux

Install from the AUR:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/diffr.git cd diffr makepkg -si

From Source

You will need the Rust compiler installed.

git clone https://github.com/mookid/diffr.git cd diffr cargo install --path .

How to use it?

diffr tries to be a well behaved unix program: it reads its input from stdin and writes to stdout.

To test it:

cargo build --release git show HEAD | path/to/diffr

To integrate it with git:

Add the following section to your .gitconfig file:

[pager] log = path/to/diffr | less -R show = path/to/diffr | less -R diff = path/to/diffr | less -R

Display customization

Use the --colors flag.

You can customize the display of diffing and common segments of added and removed lines.

For example,

diffr --colors refine-removed:background:200,0,0:foreground:white:bold tweaks the red used for uniquely removed text;

diffr --colors removed:background:magenta --colors added:background:magenta

configures the display so that common segments are less visible than the default red and green unique segments.

Related projects

This is improvement on the diff-highlight script distributed with git.

git itself provides both --word-diff and --color-words options to several commands.