On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 6:42 AM, Robert Dailey <rcdailey.lists@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The release notes mention a new heuristic for diff: > > * Output from "git diff" can be made easier to read by selecting > which lines are common and which lines are added/deleted > intelligently when the lines before and after the changed section > are the same. A command line option is added to help with the > experiment to find a good heuristics. > > However, it lacks information on exactly how to use this new feature. > I dug into the git diff documentation here: > > https://git-scm.com/docs/git-diff > > It mentions a "--compaction-heuristic" option. Is this the new > heuristic outlined by the release notes? yes. > Is the > compaction heuristic compatible with the histogram diff algorithm? yes as the compaction heuristic is applied after the actual diff is performed. > Is > there a config option to turn this on all the time? For that matter, > is this something I can keep on all the time or is it only useful in > certain situations? I think you can set diff.compactionHeuristic and it will use it by default. > > There's still so much more about this feature I would like to know. The background story (and what this new compaction heuristic is doing) is found at https://github.com/mhagger/diff-slider-tools