mirror of
https://github.com/git/git
synced 2024-08-27 19:49:21 +00:00
![Jeff King](/assets/img/avatar_default.png)
This is a simple and stupid script for highlighting differing parts of lines in a unified diff. See the README for a discussion of the limitations. Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
58 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
58 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
diff-highlight
|
|
==============
|
|
|
|
Line oriented diffs are great for reviewing code, because for most
|
|
hunks, you want to see the old and the new segments of code next to each
|
|
other. Sometimes, though, when an old line and a new line are very
|
|
similar, it's hard to immediately see the difference.
|
|
|
|
You can use "--color-words" to highlight only the changed portions of
|
|
lines. However, this can often be hard to read for code, as it loses
|
|
the line structure, and you end up with oddly formatted bits.
|
|
|
|
Instead, this script post-processes the line-oriented diff, finds pairs
|
|
of lines, and highlights the differing segments. It's currently very
|
|
simple and stupid about doing these tasks. In particular:
|
|
|
|
1. It will only highlight a pair of lines if they are the only two
|
|
lines in a hunk. It could instead try to match up "before" and
|
|
"after" lines for a given hunk into pairs of similar lines.
|
|
However, this may end up visually distracting, as the paired
|
|
lines would have other highlighted lines in between them. And in
|
|
practice, the lines which most need attention called to their
|
|
small, hard-to-see changes are touching only a single line.
|
|
|
|
2. It will find the common prefix and suffix of two lines, and
|
|
consider everything in the middle to be "different". It could
|
|
instead do a real diff of the characters between the two lines and
|
|
find common subsequences. However, the point of the highlight is to
|
|
call attention to a certain area. Even if some small subset of the
|
|
highlighted area actually didn't change, that's OK. In practice it
|
|
ends up being more readable to just have a single blob on the line
|
|
showing the interesting bit.
|
|
|
|
The goal of the script is therefore not to be exact about highlighting
|
|
changes, but to call attention to areas of interest without being
|
|
visually distracting. Non-diff lines and existing diff coloration is
|
|
preserved; the intent is that the output should look exactly the same as
|
|
the input, except for the occasional highlight.
|
|
|
|
Use
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
You can try out the diff-highlight program with:
|
|
|
|
---------------------------------------------
|
|
git log -p --color | /path/to/diff-highlight
|
|
---------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
If you want to use it all the time, drop it in your $PATH and put the
|
|
following in your git configuration:
|
|
|
|
---------------------------------------------
|
|
[pager]
|
|
log = diff-highlight | less
|
|
show = diff-highlight | less
|
|
diff = diff-highlight | less
|
|
---------------------------------------------
|