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

[Daniel Micay]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 6:41 PM, Leonid Isaev <lisaev at umail.iu.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Jul 2013 18:11:05 -0400
> Daniel Micay <danielmicay at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 5:57 PM, Pedro Alejandro López-Valencia
>> <palopezv at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Daniel Micay <danielmicay at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> >> There's absolutely no part of the merging process `vimdiff` is hiding
>> >> from you. You're enamoured with doing tedious, repetitive work but
>> >> most of us would rather invest a few minutes in learning a more
>> >> powerful tool or writing a bit of code than wasting our time.
>> >
>> >
>> > And you are enamoured with trying desperately to prove random, unknown
>> > people in the internet that you are right, because you have being
>> > given the divine right to be always correct as dispensed to you by
>> > God.
>> >
>> > Child, I stopped doing that several decades ago. You win by default.
>> >
>> > --
>> > http://about.me/palopezv
>>
>> It's a mailing list, we don't care how many years of experience you
>> claim to have. I only care that you're telling people to waste their
>> time by suggesting they do merges with pen and paper instead of tools
>> in the repositories supporting the workflow of a merge.
>
> Please guys... you only add more work for the moderators.
>
> FWIW, in my experience for simple configuration files, merging .pacnew's is
> easiest with a usual "diff -u a.conf a.conf.pacnew | vim -". It gives you a
> nice colored diff similar to what you get from git or mercurial. On the other
> hand, for large updates, e.g. samba 3.x -> samba 4.x, it is much faster to just
> recreate your config.
>
> Cheers,
> L.
>
> --
> Leonid Isaev
> GnuPG key: 0x164B5A6D
> Fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE  775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D

You can use `git diff` on files not part of a git repository with `--no-index`.

If you're already going to be using `vim`, you might as well be using
`vimdiff` for a nicer representation of the deltas along with it
updating as you merge. There are even keybindings to merge hunks
automatically.