Ydiff

Term based tool to view colored, incremental diff in a version controlled workspace (supports Git, Mercurial, Perforce and Svn so far) or from stdin, with side by side (similar to diff -y) and auto pager support. Requires python3 and less.

Ydiff only supports diff in Unified Format. This is default in most version control system except Perforce, which needs an environment variable P4DIFF="diff -u" to output unified diff.

Installation

Ydiff only depends on Python built-in libraries, so you can just download the source and run without worrying about any installation.

Git tagged releases will be packaged and uploaded to PyPI timely, however, packages hosted elsewhere are not (please note they are not managed by the author @ymattw).

Download directly

Just save ydiff.py to whatever directory which is in your $PATH, for example, $HOME/bin is in my $PATH, so I save the script there and name as ydiff.

curl -L https://raw.github.com/ymattw/ydiff/master/ydiff.py > ~/bin/ydiff
chmod +x ~/bin/ydiff

Install with pip

Ydiff is already listed on PyPI, you can install with pip if you have the tool.

pip install --upgrade ydiff

Install with setup.py

You can also run the setup.py from the source if you don't have pip.

git clone https://github.com/ymattw/ydiff.git
cd ydiff
./setup.py install

Install with Homebrew

You can also install with Homebrew on Mac. (Thanks to @josa42, @bfontaine, @hivehand and @nijikon for contributing to the Homebrew Formula).

brew install ydiff

Install on Fedora

On Fedora, you can install ydiff with dnf.

dnf install ydiff

Install on FreeBSD

On FreeBSD, you can install ydiff with pkg.

pkg install ydiff

Usage

Type ydiff -h to show usage:

$ ydiff -h
Usage: ydiff [options] [file|dir ...]

View colored, incremental diff in a workspace or from stdin, with side by side
and auto pager support

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s, --side-by-side    enable side-by-side mode (default True; DEPRECATED)
  -u, --unified         show diff in unified mode (disables side-by-side mode)
  -w N, --width=N       set text width for side-by-side mode, 0 (default) for
                        auto detection and fallback to 80 when not possible
  -l, --log             show log with changes from revision control
  -c M, --color=M       colorize mode 'auto' (default), 'always', or 'never'
  -t N, --tab-width=N   convert tab chars to this many spaces (default: 8)
  --wrap                wrap long lines in side-by-side view (default True;
                        DEPRECATED)
  --nowrap, --no-wrap   do not wrap long lines in side-by-side view
  -p M, --pager=M       pager application to feed output to, default is 'less'
  -o M, --pager-options=M
                        options to supply to pager application

  Note:
    Option parser will stop on first unknown option and pass them down to
    underneath revision control. Environment variable YDIFF_OPTIONS may be
    used to specify default options that will be placed at the beginning
    of the argument list.

Read diff from local modification in a Git/Mercurial/Perforce/Svn workspace (output from e.g. git diff, svn diff):

cd proj-workspace
ydiff                       # view colored side by side diff, auto set text
                            # width based on terminal size
ydiff -u                    # view colored incremental diff in unified mode
ydiff -w 90                 # use text width 90, wrap long lines
ydiff --no-wrap             # auto set text width but do not wrap long lines
ydiff file1 dir2            # view modification of given files/dirs only
ydiff -w90 -- -U10          # pass '-U10' to underneath revision diff tool
ydiff -w90 -U10             # '--' is optional as it's unknown to ydiff
ydiff --cached              # show git staged diff (git diff --cached)
ydiff -r1234                # show svn diff to revision 1234

Read log with changes in a Git/Mercurial/Svn workspace (output from e.g. git log -p, svn log --diff), note --diff option is new in svn 1.7.0:

cd proj-workspace
ydiff -l                    # read log along with changes, side by side
ydiff -lu                   # equivalent to ydiff -l -u, unified mode
ydiff -l -w90 --no-wrap     # set text width 90 and disable wrapping
ydiff -l file1 dir2         # see log with changes of given files/dirs only

Utilize a specific pager application:

ydiff                           # default pager - less
LESS_OPTS='-FRSX --shift 1'
ydiff -p less -o "${LESS_OPTS}" # emulate default pager
ydiff -p /opt/bin/less          # custom pager to override 'less' in $PATH
ydiff -p cat                    # non-paging ANSI processor for colorizing

Pipe in a diff:

git log -p -2 | ydiff       # view git log with changes of last 2 commits
git show 15bfa | ydiff      # view a given git commit, side by side
svn diff -r1234 | ydiff     # view svn diff comparing to given revision
diff -u file1 file2 | ydiff # view diff between two files (note the '-u')
diff -ur dir1 dir2 | ydiff  # view diff between two dirs

# View diff in a GitHub pull request, side by side
curl https://github.com/ymattw/ydiff/pull/11.diff | ydiff

# View a patch file in colored unified format.
ydiff -u < foo.patch

Redirect output to another patch file is safe even without -u:

svn diff -r PREV | ydiff > my.patch

Environment variable

Environment variable YDIFF_OPTIONS may be used to specify default options that will be placed at the beginning of the argument list, for example:

export YDIFF_OPTIONS='-w100'
ydiff foo                   # equivalent to "ydiff -w100 foo"

Note the default pager less takes options from the environment variable LESS.

Notes

If you feel more comfortable with a command such as git ydiff to trigger the ydiff command, you may symlink the executable to one named git-ydiff as follows:

ydiff_dir=$(dirname $(which ydiff))
ln -s "${ydiff_dir}/ydiff" "${ydiff_dir}/git-ydiff"

Known issues

Ydiff has following known issues:

• Side by side mode has alignment problem for wide chars
• Terminal might be in a mess on exception (type reset can fix it)

Pull requests are very welcome, please make sure your changes can pass unit tests and regression tests by run make docker-test.