DIFFT(1) 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>

DIFFT(1)