DIFFT(1)

💅 NAME

okay so bestie, meet difft — a structural diff tool that understands syntax — from the General Commands Manual, aka DIFFT(1). she’s not like other diff tools, fr fr 🫶✨

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

difft [OPTIONS] OLD-PATH NEW-PATH

difft [OPTIONS] DIRECTORY-ONE DIRECTORY-TWO

difft [OPTIONS] FILE-WITH-CONFLICTS

difft --list-languages

difft --help

🦋 DESCRIPTION

difftastic (difft) is a CLI diff tool that compares files based on their syntax, not line-by-line. Difftastic produces accurate diffs that are easier for humans to read. it’s giving “actually helpful” energy 😭✨

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• --background BACKGROUND — set the background brightness. Difftastic will prefer brighter colours on dark backgrounds.
• --byte-limit LIMIT — use a line-oriented diff if either input file exceeds this size.
• --check-only — report whether there are any changes, but don’t calculate them. much faster.
• --color WHEN — when to use color output.
• -c, --context LINES — the number of contextual lines to show around changed lines.
• --display MODE — display mode for showing results. the modes are:
  • side-by-side: display the before file and the after file in two separate columns, with line numbers aligned according to unchanged content. if a change is exclusively additions or exclusively removals, use a single column.
  • side-by-side-show-both: the same as side-by-side, but always uses two columns.
  • inline: a single column display, closer to traditional diff display.
  • json: output the results as a machine-readable JSON array with an element per file.
• --exit-code — set the exit code to 1 if there are syntactic changes in any files. for files where there is no detected language (e.g. unsupported language or binary files), sets the exit code if there are any byte changes.
• --graph-limit LIMIT — use a line-oriented diff if the structural graph exceeds this number of nodes in memory.
• -h, --help — print help information.
• --ignore-comments — don’t consider comments when diffing.
• --list-languages — print all the languages supported by difftastic, along with their extensions.
• --override GLOB:NAME — associate this glob pattern with this language, overriding normal language detection. for example:

$ difft --override='*.c:C++' old.c new.c

see --list-languages for the list of language names. language names are matched case insensitively. overrides may also specify the language text to treat a file as plain text.

this argument may be given more than once. for example:

$ difft --override='CustomFile:json' --override='*.c:text' old.c new.c

to configure multiple overrides using environment variables, difftastic also accepts DFT_OVERRIDE_1 up to DFT_OVERRIDE_9.

$ export DFT_OVERRIDE='CustomFile:json'
$ export DFT_OVERRIDE_1='*.c:text'
$ export DFT_OVERRIDE_2='*.js:javascript jsx'

when multiple overrides are specified, the first matching override wins.

• --parse-error-limit LIMIT — use a line-oriented diff if the number of parse errors exceeds this value.
• --skip-unchanged — don’t display anything if a file is unchanged.
• --sort-paths — when diffing a directory, output the results sorted by path. this is slower.
• --strip-cr — remove any carriage return characters before diffing. this can be helpful when dealing with files on Windows that contain CRLF, i.e. \r\n.
• --syntax-highlight on/off — enable or disable syntax highlighting.
• --tab-width NUMSPACES — treat a tab as this many spaces.
• -V, --version — print version information.
• --width COLUMNS — use this many columns when calculating line wrapping. if not specified, difftastic will detect the terminal width.

🙈 DEBUG OPTIONS

• --dump-syntax PATH — parse a single file with tree-sitter and display the difftastic syntax tree.
• --dump-ts PATH — parse a single file with tree-sitter and display the tree-sitter parse tree.

📖 MANUAL

a full HTML manual is available at https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/introduction ✨

💀 BUGS

see GitHub issues at https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/issues 😭

👑 AUTHOR

Wilfred Hughes me@wilfred.me.uk 🫶

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that’s the whole page, bestie 💅 — source: General Commands Manual; page: DIFFT(1); date/version: not printed here, so I’m not making one up 😭💅