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A third (fourth?) option worth mentioning here is difftastic[0], which uses "structural" diffing (as opposed to line diffing) for more granular diff highlighting. [0] https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
I’m surprised how we’re all still using line based diffs and even seemingly stupid ones at that. But the tales I hear from across the pond of paid git alternatives which diff based on understanding the programming language seem to be pretty bad as well. Though for other reasons?
Anyway, I have used a FOSS that does that, difftastic [1], and it does a pretty good job at language diff'ing without the annoyance of formatting as I hypothesised earlier.
I'm probably missing something here: author says that the split diff doesn't work for him, but doesn't say why. His ideal diff is pretty much the same as a split-diff but with redundant context removed (context is only on the left, not on both left and right). What utility does he get out of removing redundant context on the RHS of the pane?
The author writes > I need to run tests, use goto definition and other editor navigation features, apply local changes to check if some things could have been written differently, look at the wider context to notice things that should have been changed, and in general notice anything that might be not quite right with the codebase, irrespective of the historical path to the current state of the code. The editors/IDEs…
> For a large change, I don’t want to do a “diff review”, I want to do a proper code review of a codebase at a particular instant in time, paying specific attention to the recently changed areas, obviously every team and ticket is different, but IMO unless the person doing the review is some sort of principal engineer mostly responsible for the code at large, this does not align with I would personally consider a cod…
> In my book a general code review is simple sanity check by a second pair of eyes, which can result in suggestions to use different API or use an API slightly differently. This is an impoverished view of code review. Code review is a principal mechanism for reducing individual code ownership, for propagating conventions, and for skill transfer. A good code review starts with a good PR: one that outlines what its goa…
Often this includes getting feedback if that change can make problems outside the feature implemented or in the future, like introducing dependencies that cost more in total than they help locally.
I'm probably missing something here: author says that the split diff doesn't work for him, but doesn't say why. His ideal diff is pretty much the same as a split-diff but with redundant context removed (context is only on the left, not on both left and right). What utility does he get out of removing redundant context on the RHS of the pane?
The author writes > I need to run tests, use goto definition and other editor navigation features, apply local changes to check if some things could have been written differently, look at the wider context to notice things that should have been changed, and in general notice anything that might be not quite right with the codebase, irrespective of the historical path to the current state of the code. The editors/IDEs…
I'm probably missing something here: author says that the split diff doesn't work for him, but doesn't say why. His ideal diff is pretty much the same as a split-diff but with redundant context removed (context is only on the left, not on both left and right). What utility does he get out of removing redundant context on the RHS of the pane?
The author writes > I need to run tests, use goto definition and other editor navigation features, apply local changes to check if some things could have been written differently, look at the wider context to notice things that should have been changed, and in general notice anything that might be not quite right with the codebase, irrespective of the historical path to the current state of the code. The editors/IDEs…
Sure, but (to me it seems that) that doesn't necessitate the display change he is advocating for.
A diff program that has nice code navigation (and/or other IDE features) would be great, but what does that have to do with whether it is displaying the common split-diff, or his take on the split-diff.
I'm probably missing something here: author says that the split diff doesn't work for him, but doesn't say why. His ideal diff is pretty much the same as a split-diff but with redundant context removed (context is only on the left, not on both left and right). What utility does he get out of removing redundant context on the RHS of the pane?
LHS shows current code, without any modifications. By showing full context in one view (with code browsing capabilities!) and changes in the other, the author is able to browse the code and see what changes, if any, are applied in a particular context. In my understanding the author wants to flip the diff around: instead of looking at changes themselves, the author wants to look at code and see if there are any assoc…
That's the bit I don't understand - how does the "changes in the other" help if displayed only as the unified snippet[1]? To my mind, the magic sauce bit is the full code navigation, and there's no reason that the RHS pane has to be limited to a unified diff when it can simply show the whole file with higlighted lines, the way split diff views do on the RHS.
[1] Perhaps (and I'm only guessing here), that the RHS must show the entire unified diff for the entire changeset, and not just the unified diff for the current file. To me, that makes the proposal an upgrade from "either show unified diff, or split-diff, file-by-file".
They're a diff tool. The author's approach is creative but seems like it's the wrong tool for the job.
> For a large change, I don’t want to do a “diff review”, I want to do a proper code review of a codebase at a particular instant in time, paying specific attention to the recently changed areas, obviously every team and ticket is different, but IMO unless the person doing the review is some sort of principal engineer mostly responsible for the code at large, this does not align with I would personally consider a cod…
> In my book a general code review is simple sanity check by a second pair of eyes, which can result in suggestions to use different API or use an API slightly differently. This is an impoverished view of code review. Code review is a principal mechanism for reducing individual code ownership, for propagating conventions, and for skill transfer. A good code review starts with a good PR: one that outlines what its goa…
On the one hand, I really like constant deep feedback. I really like the consistency benefits of having another person say “that’s too much, I find that unreadable.”
On the other, I have now been at a lot of places where it was very hard to get my code reviewed, latencies of days and sometimes weeks if folks are in a particularly heinous crunchtime... And then when it does get reviewed, the stuff that I worked really hard on to get the right speed or to properly centralize cache invalidation... Suddenly someone is like “I would have done it from this other approach” and you have no idea whether it's tractable or not.
While I have never been at a place that did this, I have in my head the idea that the code should be an unfolding collective conversation, kind of like when folks are all collaborating on a shared Google Doc, I see that you are editing this section and I throw in a quick comment “don't forget to add XYZ” and then jump to a different part that I won't be stepping on their toes with. So the basic idea would be to get everybody to merge to `main` like 2 or 3 times a day if possible. In that case code review really is just “make sure this doesn't break the build or break prod, everything is behind a feature toggle, if I don't like the design I will comment on the code near the design or sketch a proof of concept showing that my approach is superior in clarity or speed or whatever”... Nobody ever takes me up on this culture shift it seems.
> For a large change, I don’t want to do a “diff review”, I want to do a proper code review of a codebase at a particular instant in time, paying specific attention to the recently changed areas, obviously every team and ticket is different, but IMO unless the person doing the review is some sort of principal engineer mostly responsible for the code at large, this does not align with I would personally consider a cod…