Project idea: github-like diff view

When you view a commit from github, it shows extra info besides standard unified diff format:

- the column number of each line (useful for jumping directly to that
line without manual counting from @@ line)
- --color-words within unified diff format, using background color to
show what part of the line has changed. This is only enabled for
1-line changes.

These can be implemented and seem useful, especially the --color-words item. Once you get familiar with diff.c I suppose you could implement both in a week (the first probably takes just a day).

On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 04:58:28PM +0700, Duy Nguyen wrote:

See contrib/diff-highlight.

-Peff

On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 9:46 PM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Thanks. I'd rather have it built in core git still. I'll try to see if I can rewrite it in C. Else, any objection to promote it to a core helper and setup pager automatically? We can have a config key to turn it off, but if git diff is colored, then it could be on by default.

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 04:59:17PM +0700, Duy Nguyen wrote:

If you are going to write it as part of git, it would be interesting to try using a real word-diff to find the inter-line changes, instead of the "front and back match" heuristic that the script uses. I know there are some cases that would look better, like:

  -foo(buf, len);
  +foo(obj->buf, obj->len);

but I suspect some cases would also look worse. It would be interesting to experiment with, though.

-Peff

Duy Nguyen wrote:

Having so many tools that should be rewritten to C, I don't see why anybody should spent time rewriting scripts that are not part of the core and for the most part do their job already.