alt.hn

4/11/2026 at 6:07:49 PM

How to build a `Git diff` driver

 https://www.jvt.me/posts/2026/04/11/how-git-diff-driver/

by zdw

4/11/2026 at 8:29:35 PM

Related: my favorite viewer is diff2html-cli which lets you see the diff in your browser:

https://diff2html.xyz/

by yboris

4/12/2026 at 2:07:18 AM

You might also like webdiff, which does something similar https://github.com/danvk/webdiff (I built this years ago and still use it every day.)

by danvk

4/11/2026 at 8:36:09 PM

my favorite online diff viewer so far is https://diffs.dev/, very straightforward. Diff2html looks cool too given it can work in terminal

by JavierFlores09

4/11/2026 at 11:19:08 PM

Why not just use Araxis Merge or Beyond Compare?

by forrestthewoods

4/12/2026 at 2:25:53 AM

Some alternatives to paid solutions:

WinMerge is excellent, open source, and while Windows-only, it runs well in Wine without needing any tweaks.

Kdiff is open source, cross-platform, and while I personally don’t love it, it supports 4-pane merge, which is quite ergonomic and rare.

by WalterGR

4/12/2026 at 1:30:42 AM

The point about textconv being sufficient in many cases is worth emphasizing — the cases where you actually need a full diff driver are when the file has semantics that text diff destroys. OpenAPI specs are a good example: a field rename looks like a deletion + addition in text diff but is a single semantic change.

I ran into the same thing building a semantic diff for a DSL compiler — text diff would report noise on every whitespace or reorder change, but the meaningful question is "which fields changed type, which statements were added or removed." Once you're operating on the AST the signal-to-noise ratio is completely different.

by semanticintent

4/12/2026 at 3:12:30 AM

Is there an OSS git diff for images and multimedia?

by tarun_anand

4/12/2026 at 4:22:42 AM

I bet there might be something but you can probably create your own by using ImageMagick[1] and some manipulations. For ex. for images, I would create a temp file or use a process substitition + open on OSX or xdg-open on Linux. Here is a first post about

Or you can make it even easier(cause the output is only a text) and simply print out the difference in metadata directly. You might need some other tools like ImageMagick but at least no shenanigans with viewing binary data as part of your diff.

[1]https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5132749/diff-an-image-us...

by alkh

4/12/2026 at 4:35:55 AM

Yes, there is imgap: https://github.com/roblillack/imgap

You can use it to create delta images for git diff but also to interactively compare changes via git difftool.

by da_rob

4/12/2026 at 5:07:17 AM

Nothing beats sublime merge for this.

by faangguyindia