difftastic

difftastic (dtf) parses source code using tree-sitter and diffs the syntax tree rather than raw text. This means it understands the structure of code rather than treating files as sequences of lines.

The practical result: difftastic ignores reformatting. If code is reflowed across lines, or whitespace is adjusted, difftastic sees through that and shows you the semantically meaningful changes. When a file type isn't recognized, it falls back to line-oriented diff with word highlighting.

Git integration

Configure difftastic as your git difftool:

git config --global diff.tool difftastic
git config --global difftool.difftastic.cmd 'difft "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"'
git difftool HEAD~1

Basic usage

difft file1.js file2.js
difft --check-only --exit-code before.py after.py   # Check without output.
difft file_with_conflicts.js                        # Understand merge conflicts.

difftastic supports over 30 languages including C, C++, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, TypeScript, and more.