helpful
difftastic
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helpful | difftastic | |
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34 | 68 | |
1,063 | 19,450 | |
- | - | |
5.9 | 9.9 | |
3 months ago | 8 days ago | |
Emacs Lisp | Rust | |
- | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
helpful
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How to "touch file" in dired mode?
If you want to programmatically create files, write to them, etc, then read the fine manual, it comes with your Emacs, has index, search and web-like navigation. It is well worth your time investing in looking up the manual, both for Emacs and for Elisp. You access the manual via C-h i. Another good thing to learn how to use is Emacs built-in help. As a minimal basic, C-h f will display information about functions, and C-h v will display the documentation for variables. You can also see where things are declared, open the source code, etc. A good alternative to built-in help is Helpful, which I suggest installing and start using too.
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Is doom emacs still actively maintained?
It tweaks Emacs GC. You can run M-x describe-variable while your cursor is at gc-cons-threshold to learn about it. If you opted-in for using "Vim bindings" (Evil mode), you can press K while in normal mode. Note that K doesn't run the describe- command in Doom, but it runs helpful-command from (https://github.com/Wilfred/helpful), which provides more context that describe- commands usually do.
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Quickly learning some LISP basics for using emacs?
The packages helpful and elisp-demos are super useful because they enhance Emacs' built-in documentation.
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Is the official GNU Emacs up to date?
You can try to actually use helpful for a while. There was also a package with examples, I don't remember the name, perhaps someone else knows which I mean, that shows usage of a function where available. I remember using it and found it very useful for a while when I was learning elisp more actively. I still use helpful sometimes.
- Helpful: Better Emacs Help
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Best emacs configs for Javascript and/or users who don't like to memorize keybindings?
Once you got the hang of keybindings, which-key is a helpful extension (aka package) to Emacs. At this stage, there are other helpful packages and keybindings.
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Doom -> vanilla emacs 29
helpful for better help buffers
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Emacs terminology
Since you seem interested, have a look at elisp-demos , too. It works in tandem with helpful.
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Good short documentation for CL functions (etc.) available?
Elisp Docs are fantastic they have documented everything while with CL most documentation is missing or only on the Web. With Emacs, one need to learn about C-h f (describe-function), C-h k (describe-key), helpful.el and elisp-demos and a new world opens. Terminology is always different, simple example: Microsoft terminology sounds like bullshit, to a Unix person.
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What's the Best Way to Learn Emacs?
Your primary source of knowledge will be the manual and the built-in discoverability (describe-* functions, or helpful) and of course reading the code. I'm not a manual person myself, but Emacs is one of the examples where it is truly excellent and has answers for almost everything.
difftastic
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Linus Torvalds adds arbitrary tabs to kernel code
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".
- FLaNK AI Weekly 25 March 2025
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Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax
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....
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So You Think You Know Git – Git Tips and Tricks by Scott Chacon
Use the fantastic difftastic instead of git's diff. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/
[alias]
- Difftastic: A structural diff tool that understands syntax
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SemanticDiff now supports Rust
difftastic provides similar capabilities in a free tool based on treesitter
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My programming language aware diff for VS Code and GitHub now supports Rust
difftastic? https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
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Prettier $20k Bounty was Claimed
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.
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Pijul: Version-Control Post-Git • Goto 2023
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
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Always leave a trailing comma in Python lists, dicts, tuples
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.
What are some alternatives?
emacs-which-key - Emacs package that displays available keybindings in popup
delta - A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, and grep output
elisp-demos - Demonstrate Emacs Lisp APIs
diffsitter - A tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs
marginalia - :scroll: marginalia.el - Marginalia in the minibuffer
neogit - An interactive and powerful Git interface for Neovim, inspired by Magit
GNU Emacs - Mirror of GNU Emacs
Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code
solarized-emacs - The Solarized colour theme, ported to Emacs.
gumtree - An awesome code differencing tool
use-package - A use-package declaration for simplifying your .emacs
tree-sitter-cpp - C++ grammar for tree-sitter