[arch-general] CLI diffing tool other than Vim?

[Daniel Micay]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 3:54 PM, P. A. <palopezv at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-07-30 at 20:05 +0200, Lukas Jirkovsky wrote:
>> On 30 July 2013 16:33, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia
>> <palopezv at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > IMnsHO, teach this person to use the tools already available: both nano,
>> > diffutils and less are part of base. Teach person to use "diff  -u"
> ...
>
>> The only diff tool comparable to vimdiff that comes into my mind is
>> emacs diff mode.
>
> You are correct, but both vimdiff and emacs diff mode are sophisticated
> crutches.

They're not "crutches", they offer an elegant presentation of the
differences between the files, and you can merge the changes
one-by-one without losing context. It only takes a few minutes to
learn, and you'll be happy you did.

> You should learn the basic tools to be able to understand the
> sophisticated ones later and make good use of them.

That's absolutely untrue, there's no secret knowledge you'll gain from
torturing yourself with an awful tool. It's only useful for generating
patches, not merging files.