Revisa is a Linux GUI (X11/Wayland) tool for viewing diffs between two directories.
More screenshots available in the website
Using mise:
# note, this only installs the revisa binary, not git-revisa
mise use --global github:guille/revisaOr manually download the latest release from GitHub Releases. Extract the archive and place both revisa and git-revisa somewhere on your PATH:
tar xzf revisa_v*_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo install -m 755 revisa_*/revisa revisa_*/git-revisa /usr/local/bin/Requires Rust 1.85+:
cargo install --git https://github.com/guille/revisa.gitNote: cargo install only installs the revisa binary. For the git-revisa wrapper, grab it from the repo or a release archive.
Alternatively, clone and build manually:
git clone https://github.com/guille/revisa.git
cd revisa
cargo build --release
# Binary at target/release/revisaRevisa is meant to be used as a git difftool, but it also works standalone.
The easiest way is to put git-revisa in your path, which will configure a difftool and can integrate with the gh cli.
For manual configuration, put this in your gitconfig:
[difftool "revisa"]
cmd = revisa --left "$LOCAL" --right "$REMOTE"
You can then call it like git difftool -d -t revisa with the same arguments as you'd normally pass. Don't forget the -d (short for --dir-diff). Without it, git tries to call revisa file by file, which will not work.
Revisa will work to review differences between any two directories. You can start it like this:
revisa diff --recheck --left example/left --right example/right/Note the --recheck flag. Without it we trust that Git has done the initial pass for us and every file has some sort of change. The flag tells revisa to check and skip identical files (by content and permissions).
- Fast.
- Hunk navigation.
- Keyboard-friendly interface, with configurable keybinds.
- Side-by-side or unified diff modes.
- Exclude directory from diff.
- Quick picker and go-to line to quickly navigate the diff.
- Search across all files.
- Rename and permission changes detection.
- Folding of unchanged regions.
I created revisa for personal use. I've been reviewing more code (guess why), Github keeps struggling and none of the tools I tried worked as I wanted them to1. I don't want to make this a product, I just put it out there in case someone else finds it useful, but I likely won't implement feature requests or fix bugs if I don't run into them or make sense to me.
Furthermore, since revisa is very tailored to my use case, it has the sort of defaults that make me not need any configuration. That being said, I have tried to expose enough customization that other people can get to a nice enough UX adjusting some knobs.
Revisa accepts many tweaks to the look and behavior of the app. These can be configured with a TOML file. By default, it will be in XDG_CONFIG_DIR/revisa/config.toml, with a fallback to ~/.config/revisa/config.toml.
You can use a custom path by passing the --config flag to the diff subcommand.
See SETTINGS.md for all configurable options.
The main pain point for most people will likely be the font face. It defaults to the system's monospace and defaults nerdfont icons to true. Most people won't have a nerdfont configured as the system default, so you will see a lot of boxes. You can either change your system's monospace font using fontconfig or set font.face through the settings. I do recommend a nerdfont, I haven't put a lot of effort into the ASCII fallback!
Revisa uses syntect to perform syntax highlighting. The binary ships with:
- Sublime Text's default syntaxes. These cover most mainstream languages.
- Some extra syntaxes for languages I use.
If you want to add more syntaxes, you can do that by putting *.sublime-syntax files inside XDG_CONFIG_DIR/revisa/syntaxes/ and running revisa build-cache.
In the future revisa will support automatically loading syntaxes from bat if it is installed on the system. It is already implemented but revisa uses an unreleased version of syntect and the dumps are not compatible.
Revisa only ships one theme by default. You can configure your own theme via the setting behaviour.theme. Themes use plist format. Themes only affect syntax highlighting, so you will likely need to also adjust the app's colors to match your preferred look.