diffsitter performs diffs on text files using the AST to compute the diff
instead of using a naive text-based diff. This can give you more semantically
meaningful diff information, which will prevent diffs from getting polluted by
formatting differences, for example.
diffstter uses the parsers from the
tree-sitter project to parse
source code. As such, the languages supported by this tool are limited by the
languages supported by the tree-sitter project.
Take the following files:
a.rs:
rust
fn main() {
let x = 1;
}
b.rs
```rust fn
main
()
{ }
fn addition() { }
fn add_two() { } ```
The standard output from diff will get you:
```text 1,2c1,12 < fn main() {
fn
main
()
{ }
fn addition() { 5c15
< fn add_one {
fn add_two() { ```
You can see that it picks up the formatting differences for the main
function, even though they aren't semantically different.
Check out the output from diffsitter:
text
- let x = 1;
- fn add_one {
+ }
+ fn addition() {
+ fn add_two() {
Since it uses the AST to calculate the difference, it knows that the formatting
differences in main between the two files isn't a meaningful difference, so
it doesn't show up in the diff.
diffsitter has some nice (terminal aware) formatting too:
In order to develop for this project, you need to clone the project and initialize all submodules (each tree-sitter grammar is added as a subdirectory).
sh
git clone
git submodule --init --recursive
This uses cargo with the cc crate, so you need to install rust and have a
working C and C++ compiler.