Tools for Differencing Text Files

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

General Tips¶

If 2 files are formatted differently, you can first format them and then check the differences between them. An extreme way is to get rid of all white spaces in the 2 files and then compare them.
```
 sed -i 's/ //g' file_1 file_2
```

Command-line Tools¶

git-diff¶

git diff is a generally useful command. It can not only show you the changes of files in side a Git repository but can also be used to compare files/directories outside of a Git repository.

Show differences between 2 files. The option --no-index can be omitted if at least one of the two files is outside a Git repository. Output of git diff is colorized.
```
 git diff --no-index file_1 file_2
```
Show differences between 2 directories, which is similar to that of showing differences between 2 files.
```
 git diff --no-index dir_1 dir_2
```

colordiff/diff¶

It is suggested that you use colordiff instead of diff as colordiff colorizes the output of diff. However, both colordiff and diff can be replaced by git diff as shown above.