difftastic VS neovim

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 It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances").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

As a software engineer, choosing and understanding your text editor is important part of your work, as it impacts your productivity and workflow efficiency. It's like choosing the perfect tool for any trade - you need to know what tool to use and how to use it effectively if you want to excel. For me, I use Neovim as my editor and I have been using it for a little over a year now.

This got me thinking about my recent pivot, my switch to Neovim by way of LazyVim to write most of my code, and using tmux to keep terminal states alive after closing a session.

Neovim: Make sure you have Neovim installed on your system. You can check the official website for installation instructions: https://neovim.io/ Git: We'll be using Git to clone the LazyVim starter pack. If you don't have Git, you can download it from https://git-scm.com/downloads

There are several ways to install Neovim. This wiki provides several guidelines on how to install Neovim.

All these thoughts I've shared, I would have them on occasion - but ever since I switched to Linux and Neovim, my curiosity has been through the roof. Switching over to Neovim and Linux was a not so fun weekend of configuration and spending half a day getting my work's local dev environment running on my new OS (which no one has tested development on). But I now have a deeper understanding of the tools I use, and have a text editor configured to be the most optimal for the way I want to use it.