DIFFT(1)

NAME
difft - a structural diff tool that understands syntax

SYNOPSIS
difft [OPTIONS] OLD-PATH NEW-PATH

difft [OPTIONS] DIRECTORY-ONE DIRECTORY-TWO

difft [OPTIONS] FILE-WITH-CONFLICTS

difft --list-languages

difft --help

DESCRIPTION
difftastic (difft) is a CLI diff tool that compares files based on their syntax, not line-by-line. Difftastic produces accurate diffs that are easier for humans to read.

  OPTIONS

--background BACKGROUND
    Set the background brightness. Difftastic will prefer brighter colours on dark backgrounds.

--byte-limit LIMIT
    Use a text diff if either input file exceeds this size.

--check-only
    Report whether there are any changes, but don’t calculate them. Much faster.

--color WHEN
    When to use color output.

--context LINES
    The number of contextual lines to show around changed lines.

--display MODE
    Display mode for showing results.

    side-by-side: Display the before file and the after file in two separate columns, with line numbers aligned according to unchanged content. If a change is exclusively additions or exclusively removals, use a single column.

    side-by-side-show-both: The same as side-by-side, but always uses two columns.

    inline: A single column display, closer to traditional diff display.

    json: Output the results as a machine-readable JSON array with an element per file.

--exit-code
    Set the exit code to 1 if there are syntactic changes in any files. For files where there is no detected language (e.g. unsupported language or binary files), sets the exit code if there are any byte changes.

--graph-limit LIMIT
    Use a text diff if the structural graph exceed this number of nodes in memory.

-h, --help
    Print help information.

--ignore-comments
    Don’t consider comments when diffing.

--list-languages
    Print the all the languages supported by difftastic, along with their extensions.

--missing-as-empty
    Treat paths that don’t exist as equivalent to an empty file. Only applies when diffing files, not directories.

--override GLOB:NAME
    Associate this glob pattern with this language, overriding normal language detection. For example:

    $ difft --override=’*.c:C++’ old.c new.c

    See --list-languages for the list of language names. Language names are matched case insensitively. Overrides may also specify the language “text” to treat a file as plain text.

    This argument may be given more than once. For example:

    $ difft --override=`CustomFile:json' --override=’*.c:text’ old.c new.c

    To configure multiple overrides using environment variables, difftastic also accepts DFT_OVERRIDE_1 up to DFT_OVERRIDE_9.

    $ export DFT_OVERRIDE=`CustomFile:json' $ export DFT_OVERRIDE_1=`.c:text’ $ export DFT_OVERRIDE_2=’.js:javascript jsx'

    When multiple overrides are specified, the first matching override wins.

--parse-error-limit LIMIT
    Use a text diff if the number of parse errors exceeds this value.

--skip-unchanged
    Don’t display anything if a file is unchanged.

--sort-paths
    When diffing a directory, output the results sorted by path. This is slower.

--strip-cr
    Remove any carriage return characters before diffing. This can be helpful when dealing with files on Windows that contain CRLF, i.e. ***.

--syntax-highlight on/off
    Enable or disable syntax highlighting.

--tab-width NUMSPACES
    Treat a tab as this many spaces.

-V, --version
    Print version information.

--width COLUMNS
    Use this many columns when calculating line wrapping. If not specified, difftastic will detect the terminal width.

  DEBUG OPTIONS

--dump-syntax PATH
    Parse a single file with tree-sitter and display the difftastic syntax tree.

--dump-ts PATH
    Parse a single file with tree-sitter and display the tree-sitter parse tree.

MANUAL
A full HTML manual is available at https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/introduction .

BUGS
See GitHub issues at https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/issues .

AUTHOR
Wilfred Hughes me@wilfred.me.uk