Side-by-side color diff at terminal using CDiff

If you use Mercurial, Git or Subversion at the shell, CDiff is a useful tool to have around. By default, hg diff or git diff is displayed in the classic diff format. This shows the before-and-after changed lines one below the other. Personally, I find this very confusing. I very much prefer the side-by-side diff view used in GUI diff programs. cdiff is a great way to get this side-by-side diff view at the shell in full color!

Install

CDiff is a Python program that can be installed from PyPI using this command:

$ sudo pip install cdiff

Note: Do not confuse this package with the colordiff package that is available in Ubuntu repositories. That is something else!

Usage

• Invoke cdiff in any subdirectory of a Mercurial, Git or Subversion repository. By default, this shows a colorful diff of the changes in all uncommitted files.

• To get side-by-side diff view use: cdiff -s

• CDiff assumes that your window width is 80 by default. I prefer to view side-by-side diff that uses the full width of my terminal window. This can be achieved by invoking: cdiff -s -w 0

• To diff two files, just pass them through diff -u and pipe that to cdiff:

$ diff -u file1.cpp file2.cpp | cdiff -s

Tried with: CDiff 0.9.7, Python 2.7.6 and Ubuntu 14.04