icdiff presents differences between two files in a colourised two-column layout. Its aim is to make small changes within otherwise similar lines immediately visible without trying to replace traditional diff for every use case.
The tool is useful when a normal unified diff makes it difficult to see exactly what changed. Long lines can be wrapped or truncated, surrounding context can be adjusted, and the colour scheme can be adapted to suit the terminal.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Displays compared files side by side with word-level colour highlighting.
- Automatically detects terminal width on supported systems or accepts an explicit column width.
- Supports configurable input and output encodings.
- Can exclude lines matching a regular expression from the comparison.
- Can limit comparison to the first specified number of lines.
- Offers optional line numbers and custom labels for each side of the comparison.
- Can recursively compare directories.
- Can report files that are identical as well as files containing changes.
- Provides controls for displaying whitespace differences and configuring tab width.
- Can truncate long lines instead of wrapping them.
- Lets users choose the amount of surrounding context or display whole files.
- Provides configurable colours for additions, removals, changed text, metadata and separators.
- Integrates with Git as an external difftool and includes a git-icdiff helper.
- Can also be used with Subversion as an external diff command.
Website: github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff
Support:
Developer: Jeff Kaufman and many contributors
License: Python Software Foundation License Version 2
icdiff is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Terminal-Based Diff Tools | |
|---|---|
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| Patdiff | File diff using the Patience Diff algorithm |
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| semdiff | Semantic diff tool written in Rust |
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