Ask HN: Alternative to svn diff? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Alternative to svn diff?

2 pointssymbiotic5 comments

Often I need to work on a remote machine via ssh for work. I have no problem using svn on the command line other than when I need to diff two revisions of a file.

I find the output hard to read and sometimes it just tells me that the entire old file was removed, and the entire new file was added, really giving me no information about what was actually changed.

It would be great if there was some command line tool that would give me a little bit nicer output (something that's easier to read than the traditional pluses and minuses).

Has anyone else encountered this problem and/or found a good solution?

How about some visual diff tools? It depends on the platform, but there are some really nice ones out there. If you're using Linux, try out meld. This guy has a nice little script for diffing SVN stuff: http://www.toolsforteams.com/roller/blog/entry/svn_diff_with...

For Windows, I hear Beyond Compare is great, though I don't know if it has SVN integration...

For Mac, maybe http://www.versionsapp.com/ does what you need?

I personally like to use vimdiff when viewing changes. A quick google shows some easy to follow instructions for setting it up:

http://blog.tplus1.com/index.php/2007/08/29/how-to-use-vimdi...

This looks promising. Unfortunately I can't use any GUI tools because the server doesn't have a GUI installed.

Um, vimdiff is a command line tool... I run it in my terminals all the time...

Take a look at

  svn help diff

Specifically, you can pass arguments down to diff itself.

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