neon-diff

neon-diff is an application written in C++ that colorizes and highlights unified diffs similar to colordiff, but using smart highlighting of changed words/characters. Its goal is to make you spot changes in big chunks of code/text much faster and to make diffs more readable.

• Colorizes changed lines and headers (similar to git)
• Detects changed parts of lines and highlights them
• Output remains valid unified diff (it can be used with git's interactive.diffFilter)

Screenshot of vanilla git diff compared to git and neon-diff

Build/Install

You will require git, cmake and gcc (or clang) compiler.

git clone https://github.com/maxrd2/neon-diff.git && cd neon-diff
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Usage

git

git diff | neon-diff | less --tabs=4 -RFX

diff

diff --unified originalFile.txt changedFile.txt | neon-diff | less --tabs=4 -RFX

configuring as default in git

Configure git to use neon-diff for all diff output:

git config --global core.pager "neon-diff | less --tabs=4 -RFX"

Configure git to use neon-diff for interactive add (git add -pi):

git config --global interactive.diffFilter "neon-diff"

Contributing

Pull requests and patches are welcome. Please follow the coding style.

We are also looking for any feedback or ideas on how to make neon-diff even better.

License

neon-diff is released under GNU General Public License v3.0