¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

icdiff is a simple diffing tool written in python by Jeff Kaufman that comes with two sensible out-of-the-box defaults:

• colored diff output
• side-by-side diff

The usual diff tool in Unix system has some basic color support¹. Nonetheless, sometimes the output of icdiff is better, with little effort or memorization.

Given two files (pardon my lack of creativity, but at least you know it’s not AI generated):

% cat first
gustavo
fring
walter
white
% cat second
walter
white
jesse
pinkman

Plain diff output (terrible, IMHO):

% diff first second
1,2d0
< gustavo
< fring
4a3,4
> jesse
> pinkman

Better diff output:

% diff --color=auto -uN first second
--- first	2024-07-09 10:50:01
+++ second	2024-07-09 10:50:08
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-gustavo
-fring
 walter
 white
+jesse
+pinkman

…which is why I have alias diff="diff --color=auto -uN" in my shell config / dotfiles.

With icdiff:

% icdiff first second
first            second
gustavo
fring
walter           walter
white            white
                 jesse
                 pinkman

Two observations:

• in this blog you cannot see the colors, therefore this example is meh
• icdiff will happily utilize your full terminal width, positioning the second column quite to the right in case, thereby fully utilizing the available space