Does anybody know of any tools for doing side-by-side visualizations
of diffs and patches which work well with Git?
By side-by-side I mean something like what's shown in this screen shot:
<http://wincent.com/images/side-by-side-diff.png>
For simple diffs there is little advantage here over a raw textual
diff, but as patch complexity and size increase the side-by-side diff
can sometimes prove itself to be more useful:
- totally flexible notion of context (you can scroll as far as you
want in either direction)
- this flexibility comes with the same rapid movement between changes
(ie. up/down cursor keys to jump between hunks no matter how far
apart they are)
- for complex diffs, truly comprehending the nature of the changes
may be easier in a side-by-side format
- as icing on cake, the implementation in the screenshot highlights
the removed/added portions within each line
Now, that screenshot is actually of Apple's FileMerge app on Mac OS X
and it would be fairly straightforward to write a dump wrapper script
that either just interpreted the output of git-diff, or could be used
in conjunction with GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF, to feed files into opendiff
two at a time, but that wouldn't allow you to easily visualize diffs
which touch many paths.
So, can anyone recommend a tool which can do this kind of side-by-
side visualization and plays nicely with Git? Experience with
opendiff and git-mergetool has spoilt me here. For most cases I would
continue to use vanilla git-diff (or gitk), but when I see a change
that I'd like to visualize side-by-side I'd like to be able to use
this alternative diff viewer (or can gitk already do side-by-side
diffs and I just haven't seen how to turn them on?). Bonus points if
I could not only view existing commits, but proposed commits too (ie.
the ability to feed in a patch and see a side-by-side visualization
of what the diff would look like if applied).
If nothing exists I will look at quickly hacking something together
(most likely something that just reads the output of git-diff), but
it will be just that, a quick hack.
Cheers,
Wincent
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