I can believe that they can come with that... but `man diff` doesn't mention it at all, I can't find any description of the diff/patch format that mentions it, and I've literally never seen it. I do frequently get multi-megabyte single-line diffs though, which amount to just one or two characters changing.

Other tools exist, of course, but if you're going to be shipping around stuff that `git apply` or thousands of other tools can handle, it has to be in "the" standard format.

Yeah, meld handles this fine.