helix VS difftastic

Nice post. Obligatory Helix plug: For anyone interested in taking this further, there are whole editors designed around multi-cursor editing.

https://helix-editor.com/

I could never turn it off completely but I do sometimes use the Acme theme during the day (it's too bright in the evening), which highlights just comments, strings, and errors.

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/wiki/Themes#acme

You can use a snippet LSP to work around Helix not having a built-in LSP manager. They're listed in https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/issues/395

I'm probably not the average python programmer.

But I normally just create two terminals (I have a tiling window manager) and in one I open a python file under /tmp/ write my code and execute it in the other terminal.

I would probably use a REPL if it was integrated in my favorite editor ( https://helix-editor.com ).

Wow, that's been there a while: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/commit/35c974c9c49f912...

Wonder how I missed that. I'm getting a re-education in helix today -- thank you! I'll go through `hx --tutor` again before I insert any more feet in my mouth.

Interesting to see how they are gonna approach integrating plugins/extensions system, because this is likely gonna be one of the major factors affecting adoption and ecosystem growth.

Helix devs, for instance, lean towards a Scheme-like implementation. [1]

[1]: https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/3806#discu...

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.