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:
This project uses Github actions to build and publish binaries for each tagged release. You can download binaries from there if your platform is listed.
You can install using cargo the standard way with cargo install diffsitter.
You can use my tap to install diffsitter:
```sh brew tap afnanenayet/tap brew install diffsitter
```
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.
This project targets the latest stable version of rustc, it may work on older versions, but I only guarantee support for the latest stable release.