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Comment by llbbdd | Hacker News Reader

I was looking for a good TUI tool for diffs recently, but I'm not sure yet if what I want exists already (and I don't think this tool does it (yet?)). I've been moving my workflow out of VSCode as I'm using TUI-driven coding agents more often lately but one thing I miss from my VSCode/GitHub workflow is the ability to provide a comment on lines or ranges in a diff to provide targeted feedback to the agent. Most diff tools seem to be (rightfully) focused on cleanly visualizing changes and not necessarily iterating on the change.

I admit I haven't looked super hard yet, I settled on configuring git to use delta [0] for now and I'm happy with it, but I'm curious if anyone has a workflow for reviewing/iterating on diffs in the terminal that they'd be willing to share. Also open to being told that I'm lightyears behind and that there's a better mental model for this.

[0] https://github.com/dandavison/delta/

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Octo [0] for nvim lets you submit reviews, add comments on ranges, reply to threads, etc.

This in conjunction with gh-dash [1] to launch a review can get you a pretty nice TUI review workflow.

[0] https://github.com/pwntester/octo.nvim

[1] https://github.com/dlvhdr/gh-dash

*Edit: I see you meant providing feedback to an agent, not a PR. Well that's what I get for reading too fast.

No problem, I appreciate another reason to look at Neovim; I do sometimes have a need to interact with GH's actual PR flow and once I've moved the rest of my workflow out of VSCode, Neovim looks like the best option for the last mile of actually writing and editing code. I just have to commit the time to set it up with everything I probably take for granted in VSCode's editor.

Micro editor is a great choice as well imo but I don't think that micro has the thriving plugin ecosystem as compared to neovim but it is possible to make plugins for micro editor as well

https://github.com/micro-editor/plugin-channel

Link to Micro editor: https://micro-editor.github.io/

Checkout https://github.com/agavra/tuicr - it's built exactly for this purpose (reviewing code in your terminal and then adding comments and exporting it to an agent to fix).

This is really nice! I like the ability to add comments to "send it back" for another pass.

I had tried `delta` a few years ago but eventually went with `diff-so-fancy`[1]

The two are kind of similar if I remember correctly, and both offer a lot of config options to change the style and more. I mostly use it for diffs involving long lines since it highlights changes within a line, which makes it easier to spot such edits.

I have an alias set in `~/.gitconfig` to pipe the output of `git diff` (with options) to `diff-so-fancy` with `git diffs`:

    diffs = "!f() { git diff $@ | diff-so-fancy; }; f"

[1] https://github.com/so-fancy/diff-so-fancy

You can do this with diff-highlight, which comes packaged with git. No extra packages needed.

I was also searching for some time, but most of them did not have enough context for my workflow tbh. So thats why I decided to make deff. Another good one I liked is vimdiff

I use delta for quick diffs in a shell (along with the -U0 option on git-diff), but in my claude workflow, i have a 3 pane setup in tmux: :| where the right side is a claude session, the top left is emacs opened to magit, and the bottom left is a shell. Magit makes navigating around a diff pretty easy (as well as all the other git operations), and I can dive into anything and hand edit as well.

Not TUI based but I made something called meatcheck. The idea being that the LLM requests a review from the human, you can leave inline comments like a PR review.

Once you submit it outputs to stdout and the agent reads your comments and actions them.

https://github.com/jfyne/meatcheck

Thank you! At a glance this is very close to what I had in mind, especially with the straightforward output format, I'll give this a try.

magit

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