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![]() 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> |
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diff-highlight | ||
README |
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 ---------------------------------------------