Why Patdiff?
Patience diff algorithm
Based on Bram Cohen’s patience diff algorithm, patdiff is optimized for diffing code and config files.
Patdiff includes both an OCaml library (Patdiff_lib) as well as a
command-line tool (patdiff).
Word-level refinement
Rather than displaying a small change to a line as a wholesale removal and addition of that line, patdiff shows the word-level diff of that line.
All the usual features
- Recursive diffing of directories
- Extensively configurable output (markers, colors, location format, context)
- Whitespace-aware diffing
Getting Started
Installation
$ opam install patdiff
See here for Patdiff’s opam package file.
Usage
patdiff old-file new-file
If you don’t supply any arguments to patdiff, it will read diff-like text from stdin and color it in the normal patdiff way.
The file ~/.patdiff is used as a config file if it exists. You can
write a sample config with the -make-config flag.
patdiff-git-wrapper
A simple wrapper is provided for using patdiff as git’s “external diff” tool. You can enable it with:
$ export GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF=$(where patdiff-git-wrapper.sh)
or
$ git config --global diff.external $(where patdiff-git-wrapper.sh)
Documentation
More docs, including detailed API docs, are available here.