0.62.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Diffing

Improved handling of multiline strings, which could cause a crash if they occurred at the end of the file. This was particularly noticeable with YAML.

Parsing

Improved language detection when one argument is a named pipe.

Updated to the latest tree-sitter parser for Bash, C, C++, C#, CSS, Go, Haskell, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSON, Julia, Lua, Objective-C, OCaml, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala, TOML, TypeScript and XML.

Syntax Highlighting

Improved syntax highlighting, particularly for keywords.

Build

difftastic now requires Rust 1.74.1 to build.

Prebuilt packages for macOS on x86-64 are now built on macOS 13.

0.61.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Recommended git configuration has changed! Please update your ~/.gitconfig to match the git instructions, regardless of your difftastic version.

Display

Side-by-side display is now smarter on very wide terminals when the content is narrow.

Diffing

Fixed a crash (introduced in 0.60) when the final line in a file does not have a trailing newline and occurs more than once in the file.

Build

difftastic now requires Rust 1.66 to build.

0.60.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Diffing

Fixed a crash (introduced in 0.59) when the final changed hunk included the last line of the file.

Display

Fixed an issue where files with no common content would show duplicate hunks.

Fixed a performance issue when files had extremely long lines (e.g. 100,000+ characters).

0.59.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Diffing

Fixed crash on some textual files where a single change contained more than 1,000 words.

Parsing

Added support for device tree and F#.

Difftastic now uses tree-sitter comment highlighing as a hint that nodes should be treated as atoms. This ensures comments are treated more consistently across languages. This fixes cases in Elm where comment differences were ignored, and may improve other languages too.

0.58.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Parsing

Difftastic now preserves tree-sitter parse tree structure on parse error nodes. This reverts the flattening behaviour introduced in 0.38. Preserving structure tends to produce better diffs, although it increases the risk that difftastic will show fewer changes in the presence of parse errors.

Since difftastic is now conservative with parse errors (DFT_PARSE_ERROR_LIMIT is 0 by default), this seems like a better tradeoff.

Updated C, C++, CMake, CSS, Elm, Go, Lua and Python parsers.

Diffing

--strip-cr now defaults to on, so comparing a file with CRLF endings with a file with unix line endings will not show spurious changes.

Documentation

Difftastic now has a man page, see the difft.1 file.

Performance

Fixed a memory leak and improved performance in some cases.

Command Line Interface

Fixed a crash when difftastic could not detect the terminal width, such as inside eshell.

Difftastic now also considers $COLUMNS when detecting the terminal width.

0.57.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Parsing

Text file detection is now stricter, considering null bytes as a hint that files are binaries.

Diffing

Fixed an issue where hidden files (filename starting with .) were ignored when diffing directories.

Scheme now uses the same slider heuristics as other lisps, preferring the outer delimiter.

Fixed an issue with line-based diffing where only the first line in a large changed region was highlighted. This was particularly noticeable when diffing brand new files.

Display

Fixed an issue when reporting changes in binary files, where trailing whitespace was inconsistent with other changes shown.

0.56.1

Fixed an issue with building difftastic on aarch64 with rust 1.71 or earlier.

0.56.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Parsing

Updated JavaScript, TypeScript, QML and Perl parsers.

Makefile*.in is now detected as Makefile syntax.

Improved shebang parsing with whitespace, e.g. #! /bin/bash is now detected as a shell script.

Added support for Scheme and Smali.

Diffing

Fixed an issue with runaway memory usage on text files with very long lines.

Display

Fixed an issue where all files would show a permissions change when using difftastic with git difftool.

Fixed an issue with paths not showing the containing directory when using difftastic with git difftool.

Difftastic now correctly reports file permission changes when called from git diff.

Fixed an issue with the experimental JSON display mode where it ignored --skip-unchanged.

Fixed an issue with tabs not being replaced in single-column display.

0.55.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Parsing

Added support for Objective-C and VHDL.

Files starting with <?xml are now parsed as XML.

Fixed a munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer crash on parsing some large files, particularly JSON.

Display

The default display width for tabs has changed to 4.

Fixed an issue where difftastic would sometimes output literal tabs rather than respecting the display width for tabs.

Build

difftastic now requires Rust 1.65 to build.

0.54.0

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes.

Parsing

Added support for Salesforce Apex.

Improved parsing of regex literals in Clojure and strictness annotations in Haskell.

Diffing

Difftastic will now also report file permission changes.

Fixed an issue where directory diffing would show a file more than once.

Display

Fixed a rare crash when the last non-blank line had changes for certain parsers, particularly YAML.

Command Line Interface

Difftastic now errors if given a single path, unless that file contains conflict markers. Previously this was a warning.

Build

Difftastic now requires Rust 1.63 to build.