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Comment by SomeCallMeTim | Hacker News Reader

Or use a diff tool that can do this automatically..? [1] Diff without the ability to edit the changes you see is only about 10% as useful as the ability to edit those diffs inline, change how it's decided to compare the two (or three) files (match THIS line with THIS OTHER line...), or trivially revert the changes a line at a time. [2]

I hop back and forth between GUI-based editors and the command line. Some things are just better in a GUI, and diff is one of those things--especially any nontrivial diff.

[1] http://www.scootersoftware.com/

[2] I'm sure you can do this in vi and/or emacs as well. I leave how to do that as an exercise to the reader.

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Well I don't disagree, even if everybody else does. I've long been a user of Araxis Merge, which is not only visual, but also lets you edit the diffs as you go, which comes in super handy for all the reasons that you state.

I didn't realise how spoiled I was until I started using git, and found the hard way how limiting the text diff format can be. Column-oriented changes in particular are very difficult to figure out, and even for more readable sets of changes I always found it a bit hard to get a rough idea of how spread out or clustered together the changes are. git gui and SourceTree try their best to help, but ultimately they're just displaying a prettified version of the same sometimes-unhelpful view of things.

On the other hand, if you're making small changes to a lot of files, a text diff is just the thing. It would be hyperbole to state that there's nothing worse than telling Araxis Merge to do a folder compare and find out that 1,000+ files have had 1 line changed in them - but it is rather annoying, and very time-consuming to investigate thoroughly. You need a text diff for that sort of thing.

But I still always reach for Araxis first...

As I said, I hop back and forth between GUI and command line; I haven't personally needed to deal with a folder diff with 1000+ files with one line changed each, but if I did, command line seems like a reasonable option.

Beyond Compare (linked above) lets you set patterns to ignore, which has been incredibly useful for when an autogenerated time/date stamp is changed in 1000+ files; I can say "ignore that change; tell me what changed that DOESN'T match the pattern".

You can do the same thing with grep on the command line of course. But then you lose out on all the GUI awesomeness.

I've used Araxis, and it's Even More Awesome, but 5x the cost (last I checked) as Beyond Compare, and I didn't think it was 5x as awesome. BC has gotten much cooler since then too (with comparison plug-ins, and bitmap compare -- let's see diff compare two bitmaps and tell me which pixels have changed! -- and DOC file compare, and normalized XML file compare, and so on ;).

`git difftool` is pretty much just like `git diff`, except that it shows the diff with your tool of choice.

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