difftastic VS broot

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 It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances").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.

Take a look at broot https://github.com/Canop/broot

A past coworker implemented a system like this. It was awful. He was the gatekeeper because the numbers and names had to be "just so" to meet his approval, and he was the most senior person on the team. He was neurotic in general and a pain to work with.

The idea of limiting yourself to a few top-level categories in a directory hierarchy and then doing the same with subdirectories makes sense, but adding numbers is a bad idea. It just creates more work, and other people have to learn your idiosyncratic nomenclature. Just give the directories good names and get on with it. Search really isn't as bad as the article suggests, especially with something like broot [1].

[1]: https://github.com/Canop/broot

I've used a lot of the tools mentioned here in comments, but I think just for finding a directory/file broot[1] is much faster and easier than others. Though it is also quite feature rich but mostly it's just write a fuzzy search term that could even be sub-sub-directory and open, extremely quickly.

[1] https://github.com/Canop/broot

`broot` (https://github.com/Canop/broot) is another file manager with a curious interface that seems to fill a similar niche.

Of course, there are many other file managers to choose from (mc, ranger, nnn, lf, ....), but most of them don't show nested subdirectories by default.

As a macOS user, it boils my brain whenever I've to type in something like ~/Library/Application Support/org.rust-lang.Cargo/config.toml. macOS users have been begging CLI tools to support XDG variables on macOS too. Setting defaults is a strong indication to the community what should be the "preferred" locations. The defaults defined in your article will invariably lead to some authors saying that if that path is good enough for cargo, then it is good enough for their tool. Even the latest draft RFC acknowledges that macOS should use XDG variables too. I've written more about this here.

You may be interested in broot

I think you’re conflating different projects.

There are projects that aim for a better user experience, with better command line interface, defaults, performance and UI. These are of course breaking changes and the programs can’t be used as drop in replacement. Some examples are

- ls => exa (https://github.com/ogham/exa)

- grep => ripgrep (https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep)

- cat => bat (https://github.com/sharkdp/bat)

- tree => broot (https://github.com/Canop/broot)

The person you’re replying to was speaking of a different project - uutils (https://github.com/uutils/coreutils). These are drop in replacements with identical interfaces (modulo bugs).

Even better broot, previously adding view verb to config:

Broot: https://github.com/Canop/broot