delta VS difftastic

Thanks for the difftastic & zoxide tips.

However, I've been using this git pager/difftool: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

While it's not structural like difft, it does produce more readable output for me (at least when scrolling fast through git log -p /scanning quickly

View on GitHub

I'm currently waiting on the integration between Delta and Difftastic:

https://github.com/dandavison/delta/issues/535

Difftastic now has JSON output, whic should make it much easier to build this.

I'm surely in the minority here. I've been using Emacs for almost a decade now, but I just can't get into the Magit workflow. I've tried several times, but always end up going back to Git on the command line. I have dozens of aliases, shell integrations, a nice diff viewer[1], etc., and interacting with Git has become muscle memory. I can commit, cherry-pick, rebase, bisect, fix conflicts, etc., in a fraction of the time it would take me to navigate Magit's UI. I'm sure with enough practice, a Magit user could do this more quickly and efficiently, but honestly, with some custom-built porcelain, Git's UI is not so bad. Though this could very well be Stockholm syndrome after using it for such a long time...

For whatever reason, Magit's opinionated workflows never clicked with me. A part of it is the concern that it will do something weird to my repo that I'll then have to waste more time undoing manually. I usually don't trust sugary wrappers around tools. And another is the fact I don't use Emacs on all machines, and setting up Git on a remote system is just a matter of copying over my config and some shell integrations.

Also, on a more personal note, I find the cultish fanboyism whenever Magit is brought up slightly offputting. Does anyone have anything bad to say about it? No software can realistically be this infallible. :)

[1]: https://github.com/dandavison/delta

For looking at diffs I still prefer the command line though, and use delta to view diffs between commits or branches.

i want a diff tool that shows me exactly which tokens have changed, and which haven't, regardless of how they are laid out.

These already exist: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

when we get that, then we should get even less merge conflicts.

Counterintuitively, that is not the case. AST-merge is a much, much, much, much, much harder problem than AST-diff.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic?tab=readme-ov-file#can...

The fact that diffs can be used to drive a 3-way merge is in fact an accidental property that arises due to the sheer crudeness of the diff format. As soon as you start using more-sophisticated diff formats, solutions to "the diff problem" no longer lead directly to solutions to "the merge problem".

Yes there is an `—-override` option you can use to specify the language in which a file should be parsed.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/blob/master/CHANGELOG....

Use the fantastic difftastic instead of git's diff. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

  [alias]

difftastic provides similar capabilities in a free tool based on treesitter

difftastic? https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

If you're looking for a VS Code extension or a GitHub app, check out https://semanticdiff.com/. I'm a co-founder of this project.

If you prefer a CLI tool, check out https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic. It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances"). So it will show some changes (e.g. replacing a character in a string with an escape sequence) even though they are technically equivalent.

Shameless plug: I've written difftastic[1], a tool that builds ASTs and then does a structural diff of them. You can use it with git too.

It's an incredibly hard problem though, both from a computational complexity point of view, and trying to build a comprehensible UI once you've done the structural AST diff.

[1]: https://github.com/wilfred/difftastic

There is a diff tool called difftastic: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

The idea is that it does not show diff based on text change, but on syntastic meaning. For that, it uses tree-sitter.

I think it still shows the trailing comma in the situation as shown in the article, but it's quite different experience than the standard text based diff.