Andrew Tropin

Explaining in one picture why structural diffs are important.

Both buffers contains a diff for the same change.

Mar 2 at 2:30pmWeb
Show threadYann Büchau Mar 2

@abcdw Yes, #difftastic *can* produce a much nicer diff, but only in some cases like this. I have several diff aliases, because there isn't one to rule them all. My favorite is

git diff --word-diff=color --word-diff-regex='[^[:space:][:punct:]]+'

Not perfect as it swallows some non-text characters, but very compact, whereas difftastic is often very noisy for me.

Show threadAndrew TropinMar 3

@nobodyinperson Yeah, I was experimenting with difftastic on the last stream and it produce results of variable quality. Most of the problems caused by scheme grammar not able to parse guix and guile specific reader macros, but I guess there are non-guix specific cases, where difftastic can also be noiser than line diffs.

However, you can switch to "plain text" grammar to get usual diffs. But interface for that isn't convenient yet.

I made some notes on difftastic here:
https://git.sr.ht/~abcdw/rde/tree/bb208ad2/src/rde/features/difftastic.scm#L14

Show threadAndrew TropinMar 3
@nobodyinperson Overall, I feel that structural diffs are exceptionally powerful, but the tooling and integrations are not yet here.
Show threadWilfred HughesMar 15
@abcdw @nobodyinperson Thanks for the notes! If you have specific examples that difftastic doesn't handle well, I'm very interested to see them :)
Show threadAndrew TropinMar 15

@wilfredh @nobodyinperson I didn't find an easy way to have difftastic in magit. The closest I found is emacs-delta and was curious about difftastic backend for it. And ended up in this issue:
https://github.com/dandavison/delta/issues/535

So the support for structural diff from different tools is kinda lacking at the moment.

I didn't dive deeper to get a better understanding, why there are so few integrations of difftastic in other tools.

🚀 Integration with Graphtage or Difftastic · Issue #535 · dandavison/delta

I stumbled upon Graphtage and found it a cool idea. It would be nice if delta could integrate it (and other projects like it - "semantic diffs") for specific file types. What do you think?

GitHub
Show threadAndrew TropinMar 15

@wilfredh @nobodyinperson Talking about particular diffs examples. I don't have any at hand, but I'll share, when I face it again.

Most of the problems are caused by scheme grammar, which can't parse most of the guix source code. So I need to make an updated grammar first and monkeypatch difftastic guix package to add it.

I also have plans for this grammar for Arei/Ares Guile IDE and scheme-ts-mode, so I'll definitely spend time on it. Still have a couple other projects in front of the queue.