diff

Say I get a patch created with git format-patch . The file is basically a unified diff with some metadata. If I open the file in Vim, I can see which lines have been modified, but I cannot see which characters in the changed lines differ. Does anyone know a way (in Vim, or some other free software that runs on Ubuntu) to visualize per-character differences? A counter example where per-character diff is visualized is when executing vimdiff a b . update Fri Nov 12 22:36:23 UTC 2010 diffpatch is helpful for the scenario where you're working with a single file. update Thu Jun 16 17:56:10 UTC 2016

I'm trying to find some good examples of semantic diff/merge utilities. The traditional paradigm of comparing source code files works by comparing lines and characters.. but are there any utilities out there (for any language) that actually consider the structure of code when comparing files? For example, existing diff programs will report "difference found at character 2 of line 125. File x contains v-o-i-d, where file y contains b-o-o-l". A specialized tool should be able to report "Return type of method doSomething() changed from void to bool". I would argue that this type of semantic

I know that I can view the difference between HEAD and current state with meld . . But how can I view the differences between branches, for example master and devel with meld? At the moment I do the following steps: Rename folder of working copy For example mv /projectA /projectA_master ) Clone the project again git clone url Switch to devel branch cd projectA && git -b devel origin/devel View differences with meld meld /projectA_Master projectA Isn't there an easier way to get the same result in meld? I only need it to review the changes and not primarily for merging. I also found this issue

How do you make git diff only show the difference between two commits, excluding the other commits in-between? you can simply pass the 2 commits to git diff like : -> git diff 0da94be 59ff30c > my.patch -> git apply my.patch Asking for the difference /between/ two commits without including the commits in-between makes little sense. Commits are just snapshots of the contents of the repository; asking for the difference between two necessarily includes them. So the question then is, what are you really looking for? As William suggested, cherry-picking can give you the delta of a single commit

git diff --no-index --no-prefix --summary -U4000 directory1 directory2 This works as expected in that it returns a diff of all the files between the two directories. Files that are added output as expected, files that are deleted also result in the expected diff output. However because the diff takes into account the file path as part of the file name, files with the same name, in the two different directories, result in a diff output with the renamed flag instead of changed. Is there a way to tell git to not take into account the full file path in the diff and only look at the file name, as