β Online diff tool
β’ 183 words β’ 1 min β’ updated
Sometimes I have two snippets of text in my clipboard1 that I need to diff.
The quickest way to do so is roughly like this:
% cdtmp
% $EDITOR a # then paste
% $EDITOR b # then paste the other one
% diff -uN a bcdtmp was previously covered, it cds to a
temporary directory.
The diff tool in the CLI is not very important, you could pick any one between
diff -uN, colordiff -uN or icdiff.
However the terminal has its limitations. Sometimes it’s much better to diff with a graphical application.
For macOS I’ve heard that Kaleidoscope is great, but I don’t use it. For Linux there’s KDiff3 and Meld.
It’s much easier to use a web tool though, as it’s operating system agnostic.
Julia Evans has recently recommended diffdiff: https://diffdiff.net/. I like it!
At Google we had an internally hosted one at http://diff/ (or was it go/diff?).
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If you’re only able to hold one at a time, you should definitely upgrade your workflow to using a clipboard manager, you’re missing out. For macOS, see my previous post. ↩︎