difftastic is a structural diff tool that compares files using their syntax rather than treating everything as a sequence of lines. It parses supported languages with tree-sitter and compares simplified syntax trees, allowing it to distinguish meaningful code changes from many formatting changes.
This approach is particularly useful when code has been reformatted, expressions have moved across lines, or indentation has changed without altering the underlying syntax. For files it cannot parse, difftastic falls back to a conventional line-oriented comparison with word highlighting.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Structural diffing based on syntax trees rather than raw lines.
- Supports more than 30 programming languages together with structured formats including CSS, HCL, HTML, JSON, TOML and YAML.
- Understands when whitespace is syntactically significant and when it is merely formatting.
- Can show useful changes even when code has been reformatted across different lines.
- Falls back to line-oriented diffing with word highlighting for unrecognised file types or parse failures.
- Provides side-by-side output designed for terminal viewing.
- Integrates with Git and Mercurial workflows.
- Can interpret merge conflict markers and compare the two conflicting versions of a file.
- Offers a check-only mode for determining whether two files have syntactic differences without calculating a full diff.
- Allows a configurable number of parse errors before falling back to textual comparison.
- Treats structural comparison as a graph problem and uses a shortest-path approach to calculate differences.
- Can compare directories as well as individual files.
Website: github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
Support:
Developer: Wilfred Hughes
License: MIT License
difftastic is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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