diffr
Overview
Reviewing changes involves reading diffs. Sometimes, a line-oriented presentation of changes is not precise enough, especially when changes involve long lines or very similar consecutive lines.
This program processes such diffs, and output them (in the console) with additional diff information on top of the unified diff format, using text attributes.
It works hunk by hunk, recomputing the diff on a word-by-word basis.
The current implementation uses Myers longest common subsequence algorithm.
Screenshots
Installation
Arch Linux
Install from the AUR:
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/diffr.git
cd diffr
makepkg -si
From Source
You will need the Rust compiler installed.
To install the latest published version:
cargo install diffr
Alternatively, you can build the latest version:
git clone https://github.com/mookid/diffr.git
cd diffr
cargo install --path .
How to use it?
diffr tries to be a well behaved unix program: it reads its input from stdin and writes to stdout.
To test it:
cargo build --release
git show HEAD | path/to/diffr
To integrate it with git:
Add the following section to your .gitconfig file:
[pager]
log = path/to/diffr | less -R
show = path/to/diffr | less -R
diff = path/to/diffr | less -R
[interactive]
diffFilter = path/to/diffr
Display customization
Use the --colors flag.
You can customize the display of diffing and common segments of added and removed lines.
For example,
diffr --colors refine-removed:background:200,0,0:foreground:white:bold
tweaks the red used for uniquely removed text;
The configuration used in the first screenshot is
diffr --colors refine-added:none:background:0x33,0x99,0x33:bold --colors added:none:background:0x33,0x55,0x33 --colors refine-removed:none:background:0x99,0x33,0x33:bold --colors removed:none:background:0x55,0x33,0x33
Related projects
This is improvement on the diff-highlight script distributed with git.
git itself provides both --word-diff and --color-words options to
several commands.