High on the list of things I really enjoy doing is thanking people who contribute to free software. Also high on the list is using software that works well.
So I just wanted to combine the two and say a public thanks to GP Halkes, for writing and maintaing dwdiff. I’ve been using dwdiff since early on in the MPL process, and thanks to two recent changes GP made at my request, it now works even better for my needs (and hopefully better for most people’s needs.) Thanks, GP!
I like the idea of dwdiff, but I’m not sure if it’s a drop in replacement for plain old diff. I use diff a lot with svn to see what changed between two version. I don’t see a context option for dwdiff to show me a couple lines of context on either side of a change. Also, it doesn’t want to pipe to less in color mode. I guess ESC[0,32] in the output.
What command line do you use to run dwdiff?
I don’t think it is really intended as a full replacement for traditional diff; in particular, I’m using it to create full-document redlines (appropriate for legal work) rather than context diffs.
For what it is worth, I’m using:
dwdiff -R -m8 -w “~~” -x “~~” -y “**” -z “**” -P original.text newversion.text > redline.text
Note that the texts, in my case, are in markdown, hence the use of -w/-x/-y/-z and the particular ~~ ** delimiters.
I’m not using gnu wdiff because it lacks the equivalent of -m and -P.
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@Scott Baker:
If you pipe to less, you will have to tell less that it should expect color codes. You can do this using the -R option to less. Otherwise less thinks it’s just random binary data.
There is also an option in dwdiff to just show a few lines of context instead of the whole text: -C so your command line should look something like:
dwdiff -C3 -c old new | less -R
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