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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

GNU diff has the -y option that already does side-by-side diffs; I'm a bit surprised that it doesn't do colouring already.

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I've used that a lot over the years ..and wished the same thing. hell, less can even do color with -R

Just use colordiff, `colordiff -y`works perfectly fine.

"colordiff -y" colors whole changed lines: http://www.jefftk.com/icdiff-vs-colordiff-y-2x.png

A picture is perhaps worth at least a few hundred words...

http://i.imgur.com/VOlbMoy.png

icdiff seems to have the best defaults for me.

Not for a side-by-side diff, but I just use this for color diffs:

    cdiff() {
      diff -u "$@" \
        | sed 's/^\(@@ .* @@\)$/'$'\e[36m''\1'$'\e[m''/g' \
        | sed 's/^\(-.*\)$/'$'\e[31m''\1'$'\e[m''/g' \
        | sed 's/^\(+.*\)$/'$'\e[32m''\1'$'\e[m''/g' \
        | less -c -R
    }

Your cdiff colors lines by whether they're added or removed: http://www.jefftk.com/cdiff-shell-function-2x.png

icdiff colors just the part of the line that changed: http://www.jefftk.com/icdiff-comparison-1234a1234.png

So much time would be saved if ppl did a google search before writing tools :) (its fine to reimplement, test, learn etc. But sometimes I really wonder ;)

Before I wrote this, back in 2009 [1], I looked for existing tools that would do this already. I found colordiff and cdiff, but neither of them would highlight the parts of lines that had changed. Not finding anything that did what I wanted, I wrote something.

[1] http://www.jefftk.com/p/introducing-icdiff

contributing to something seems like a better effort, tho.

You would think that would be a solution, but sometimes learning to use a tool is about as hard as writing the tool yourself. (And in a few special cases, it's even more difficult!)

Not that this applies here, but it is something to consider.

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