How to build a `Git diff` driver

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 tarun_anand7 hours ago|

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Is there an OSS git diff for images and multimedia?

by alkh6 hours ago|

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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 da_rob6 hours ago|

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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 faangguyindia5 hours ago|

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Nothing beats sublime merge for this.

by gritzko14 hours ago|

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I recently implemented a diff driver as part of git-dogs. The integration part Claude one-shotted.

Mine is token based: https://replicated.wiki/blog/img/difflet.png

The set of git tools itself, very much in development: https://github.com/gritzko/git-dogs