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Improved Git Diffs with Delta, Fzf and a Little Shell Scripting

82 points by nickjj

by linsomniac

2 subcomments

I had been using delta for around a year and liked it, but still found some of the diffs I was looking a bit hard to read. A few weeks ago after a discussion on HN I tried difftastic, and have become a fan. You might want to consider it if you go down this rabbit hole. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

by rs545837

2 subcomments

We've been building an open source tool called sem (https://github.com/ataraxy-labs/sem) that takes this one level further: entity-level diffs instead of AST-level.
Instead of showing you which syntax nodes changed, it shows you which functions, classes, and methods changed, classifies the change (text-only, syntax, functional), and walks a dependency graph to tell you the blast radius.
The delta + difftastic integration problem in that issue is interesting because sem already has the pieces both sides need, before/after content with full context for every changed entity, plus structured JSON output. The blocker in #535 is that difftastic's JSON doesn't include surrounding context. sem's output includes complete entity bodies by default.
Would love to collaborate on a common interchange format if anyone from the delta or difftastic projects is interested. Entity-level granularity sits naturally above AST-level diffs and below file-level diffs, and having a standard way to represent "what changed and what depends on it" would be useful for the whole ecosystem.

by baumy

2 subcomments

As someone who's used vim + a shell as my IDE since the start of my time using computers, it's been really awesome (and occasional eye-roll inducing...) watching people discover all these tools now that claude code is sending them into the terminal.
A lot of posts like this are making it to the front page of HN now that new people are exploring this world for the first time. That's great, the more the merrier, but gets a bit frustrating when a post title is written as if it's discovered some new awesome development tool or methodology, and it's just something people have been doing for years or even decades. This post isn't that big of an offender, but I'm thinking more of stuff like this [0] that it reminded me of.
I should try to be less grumpy about it, but I hope people also try to recognize how often these "new" tools they've been discovering have been routinely used long before LLMs. Maybe I'm just hitting my get-off-my-lawn stage, but it's a bit jarring to come to hacker news and see upvoted posts that are just "look, I can color the diffs in my terminal!". I'm glad this person discovered it, but I thought that was table stakes for the community here.
[0] https://x.com/dani_avila7/article/2023151176758268349

by diath

0 subcomment

I had to give up on diff-so-fancy because it would break a lot when used with `git diff --patch` but this post just reminded me of the issue and it turns out that it has recently been fixed, so I may give it another go.
https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy/issues/498

by jeninho

0 subcomment

Been using delta for a while now, the side by side mode alone was worth the switch. Pair it with fzf and you can browse commits interactively which is a lifesaver on repos with messy history.

0 subcomment