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

[Don deJuan]

On 07/30/2013 01:09 PM, Daniel Micay wrote:
> 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.
I agree when I was starting out as a Jr. sys admin, I had only been use
to using nano. My new boss kept giving me so much crap for using it and
not vim that I finally broke down using it. I uninstalled nano and
forced myself, within a day I was flying through the basics on vim. I
think if the person can not play with it for a day or less and get the
basics behind it especially vimdiff might not be the best person to
trust when you are gone, but that is my personal opinion.

Once I got use to vim I kept telling myself, why did I not start with it
sooner.