Difftastic Wilfred Hughes

Use this command to install Difftastic:

winget install --id=Wilfred.difftastic -e

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax.

Difftastic is a structural diff tool designed to compare files based on their syntax, providing a deeper understanding of code changes beyond traditional line-based diffs.

Key Features:

Syntax-aware comparison: Difftastic parses code to understand context, such as whitespace significance in strings or tokens in different languages.
Handling of line wrapping and alignment: It aligns similar code structures, even when lines are wrapped differently.
Integration with Git: Simplifies diffing within version control workflows.
AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) checking: Quickly verifies if two files have the same structure without generating a full diff.
Language support: Works with over 30 programming languages, falling back to word highlighting for unrecognized file types.

Audience & Benefit:
Ideal for developers, technical reviewers, and maintainers who need precise and context-aware diffs. Difftastic helps identify meaningful changes in code structure, saving time and reducing errors when reviewing or merging code. It can be installed via winget for easy setup.

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax.

For installation instructions, see Installation in the manual.

Basic Example

Screenshot of difftastic and JS

In this JavaScript example, we can see:

(1) Difftastic understands nesting. It highlights the matching { and }, but understands that foo() hasn't changed despite the leading whitespace.

(2) Difftastic understands which lines should be aligned. It's aligned bar(1) on the left with bar(2) on the right, even though the textual content isn't identical.

(3) Difftastic understands that line-wrapping isn't meaningful. "eric" is now on a new line, but it hasn't changed.

One Minute Demo

This one minute screencast demonstrates difftastic usage with both standalone files and git.

Languages

Difftastic supports over 30 programming languages, see the manual for the full list.

If a file has an unrecognised extension, difftastic uses a textual diff with word highlighting.

Known Issues

Performance. Difftastic scales relatively poorly on files with a large number of changes, and can use a lot of memory.

Display. Difftastic has a side-by-side display which usually works well, but can be confusing.

Robustness. Difftastic regularly has releases that fix crashes.

Non-goals

Patching. Difftastic output is intended for human consumption, and it does not generate patches that you can apply later. Use if you need a patch.

Difftastic Wilfred Hughes

README

Basic Example

One Minute Demo

Languages

Known Issues

Non-goals

Related Programs

FAQ

Isn't this basically --word-diff --ignore-all-space?

Can I use difftastic with git?

Does difftastic integrate with my favourite tool?

What about parse errors?

Can difftastic help me with merge conflicts?

Can difftastic do merges?

Can difftastic ignore reordering?

Can I use difftastic to check for syntactic changes without diffing?

Why aren't colours appearing in my terminal?

How does it work?

Translation

License

Isn't this basically `--word-diff --ignore-all-space`?