riff VS difftastic

There is rust diff app called riff https://github.com/walles/riff

Ohh I've not heard of riff, I'll need to check that out. Thanks for the heads up! https://github.com/walles/riff

I don't know about those features specifically, but lately I've been enjoying riff, and some other options I can think of are

#!/bin/zsh diffj () { # [] # uses: riff: https://github.com/walles/riff emulate -L zsh local lines if [[ ! $1 ]] { # without txt arg, read from stdin lines=(${(f)"$(>&1)"}) } else { lines=(${(f)"$(<$1)"}) } local colored_lines=() lineno=2 while (( lineno<=${#lines} )) { colored_lines+=( ${(f)"$(riff --no-pager =(<<<${lines[$(( lineno-1 ))]}) =(<<<${lines[$lineno]}))"} ) (( lineno+=1 )) } print -rl -- $lines[1] ${(M)colored_lines:#$'\C-[[32m'*} } diffj $@

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 It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances").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