Introducing icdiff |
March 11th, 2009 |
| icdiff, tech |
The first time I used wikipedia to look at revisions I was quite
impressed by the colored two column output indicating which bits had
changed. Working mostly on the command line, it's been frustrating
that diff can't do better than two column output. Even colored diff and cdiff only color
lines by whether they're from the left or the right, not whether
they're internally different. Python's difflib can create the
wikipedia-style two column colored output, though, and with a bit of
modification can print to the console with ansi escape sequences:
Referenced in:
And the usage:
jefftk@host~ $python icdiff.py text_A text_BThis is an unchanged lineThis is an unchanged lineThis is a line with a speleing errorThis is a line with a spelling errorThis line was deletedWhitespaceshows up where criticalWhitespace shows up where criticalBut it's notshownwhen notBut it's notuglywhen notAnd here I go, adding a line
usage: icdiff.py [options] left_file right_file
options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
--cols=COLS specify the width of the screen. Autodetection is Linux
only
--context print only differences with some context
--numlines=NUMLINES how many lines of context to print; only meaningful
with --context
--line-numbers generate output with line numbers
--show-all-spaces color all non-matching whitespace instead of just
whitespace that is critical for understanding
--print-headers label the left and right sides with their file names
Improved Color diff: icdiff
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