From: matthew@giassa.net
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 19:23:40 GMT
Subject: Question: xdiff and "pretty" (human readable) diff output
Message-ID: <20170322192340.elg2gpvcshhk3jq3@darkstar>

Good day,

I have a question with respect to how git generates "pretty" (ie: human
readable) unified diffs. It's to my understanding that git uses its own
(simplified/minimized) fork of libxdiff, simply referred to as "xdiff"
[1]. Which tool/library is used to take the xdiff output and generate
the human-readable equivalent that is rendered to the console? I have a
program that I'm maintaining that currently tracks changes to a couple
of "sandboxed" files, and I wanted to add a simple console UI that
periodically shows the changes to the files over time and/or dumps the
"pretty diff" to syslog.

Thank you.

1. "Use a *real* built-in diff generator · git/git@3443546",
   <https://github.com/git/git/commit/3443546f6ef57fe28ea5cca232df8e400bfc3883>,
   Accessed 2017-03-22

--Matthew