I made a super simple diff tool that's free and has no annoying ads | Hacker News Reader

I made a super simple diff tool that's free and has no annoying ads

littlediffer.com

24 pointsmisonic22 comments

As the years go by, I find myself increasingly in the minority of those who still prefer the unified diff view.

My favourite tool for diffing has always been “diff -u”. I sometimes even use “diff -U10000” when I want to see the entire file as context.

Thankfully, GitHub still supports unified diff view, so I don’t feel left out while reviewing GitHub pull requests.

In fact, once upon a time, when there was no GitHub or GitLab and there were no “pull requests”, open source developers used to email each other .diff files (often also named .patch files) which were nothing but unified diff files. A reviewer would apply the patch on their copy of source code with something like “patch -p0 < new.diff” and test it locally on their system. That was the CI of that era.

> As the years go by, I find myself increasingly in the minority of those who still prefer the unified diff view.

Wait, so what does the majority prefer these days then? I might be out of the loop, last time I checked (which was today) git still defaulted to unified diffs.

The default is still unified diff but I see most people around me switch the diff view to split view (the side-by-side view).

I'm so confused. Were ads a big problem before? I've been using the diff(1) tool for 25 years and never seen an ad.

  $ man diff | grep -A1 'SEE ALSO'
  SEE ALSO
         wdiff(1), cmp(1), diff3(1), sdiff(1), patch(1)

I think there's some kind of affiliate program going on...

It's definitely collusion. Why else would there be no mention of meld, kdiff3, bcompare, etc.?

We need to file an anti-trust complaint.

I've been using meld, also didn't see any ads in it yet. I didn't realize defaulting to websites for diffing was a thing. The closest thing I know to that is github pull requests, which also show no ads afaik.

Nothing against the littlediffer project, I just really wonder what ad-ridden diff tools the title would be referring to

I haven't known that I need a browser to diff two files. I always did that in the terminal, local only. Didn't know that we need some many comupting time to create a diff. /s

I was about to drop into my spiel about “it isn't so much the adverts that bother me about web-based things, it is the stalky tracking”. Though after checking I was pleasantly surprised to find it doesn't make a pile of third-party requests as some ad-free-but-still-part-of-the-stalkerverse sites do.

I don't really trust such tools unless I host them myself (in DayJob I'm not allowed to trust such tools, lest I accidentally paste information about clients' people/customers into a site that posts the data out of the country) but at least this one is starting out OK, so congratulations to the creator for making something working and clean (even if it is ultimately of limited use as local tools work much better for this purpose).

It is sad that “without stalkyness and other unnecessary bulk & distractions” isn't the norm (even for desktop utilities too often) so can be pointed out as a special feature, but that is the world we live in…

I'm the creator of this tool. There are some interesting points here so I wanted to clarify: I made it for those times when I'm in the middle of a PR review and I just want to diff two things really quickly. Sure I can create two temp files and diff them using the terminal, or in my IDE. But I wanted something more convenient.

I usually wind up in a web-based tool and they're mostly ridden with ads and very un-slick UIs.

I hope you find this helpful, I've been using it for a year and decided to just publish it.

Shouldn't this be a show HN? Also, who’s the target audience? I assume anyone familiar with diff would already know how to use it in the terminal.

I use these kind of sites quite often. I just find them more convenient. It's also way easier to instruct a layman to use a website like that than tell them to use the command line tool.

Good point!

sometimes I diff content that is just part of local files, or a local and remote file etc.. I don't want to clean-up to files for a diff to be readable.

Having a simple web-based copy-paste diff-tool is extremely valuable to me!

fair enough!

I don't think ads are an issue for a target audience. Most of it will have an ad blocker or two installed.

I’ve been telling myself never to speak out about “couple of” adblockers. Now, I know I’m not the only one. Blocking at the DNS + Client is just the starting base. Thanks.

Who is the audience that need to diff file but choose to do it by copy pasting in a web browser rather than in their editor directly or using one a diff tool in command line, none of which has ever shown any ads?

* ... your target ...

Oh lord, you have ads in your diffs?

I like difftastic.

    vimdiff file1 file2

The title feels surreal. Thanks, I'm going to append "that's free and has no annoying ads" when talking about every project I write or contribute to.

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