diff-so-fancy VS difftastic

The diff itself is impressive, but in terms of styling I still prefer diff-so-fancy[1]. It's easier to read at a glance.

[1]: https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy/

I don't have much hope for this being improved anytime soon in diff-so-fancy given this issue, so I'm wondering if there's something else I can use in Terminal that would allow me to have an experience like GitLab. If that's not possible and I have to rely on a desktop application, that would be acceptable too.

This is actually one that's really easy to write and remember but I hate typing and I run it all the time, so I've aliased it down to gd for git-diff. Also I use diff-so-fancy to make the output of my diffs look frickin sweet and I suggest you do the same.

I recommend a tool like diff-so-fancy with some custom colors. You will never want to go back to vanilla diffs.

I just discovered diff-so-fancy, and very nice it is too. I immediately added it to my standard git config, which is semi-automatically installed on every machine I use. However, I've not (yet) installed diff-so-fancy on all the machines I use, and for those platforms for which it's not packaged I probably won't bother installing it from source.

I recently switched to diff-so-fancy for use in the terminal with the following configuration:

As the primary author of diff-so-fancy, which is entirely Perl, I fully support this endeavor.

Instead of delta https://github.com/dandavison/delta (shown in the previous video), I've also used diff-so-fancy https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy and I've heard difftastic is good as well https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic Do you use one of those or something else?

diff-so-fancy - syntax highlighting for diffs, including highlighting just the part of the line that changed: diff -ru ... | diff-so-fancy | less -R

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.