Mercurial

Mercurial supports external diff tools with the Extdiff extension. Enable it by adding an entry to extensions in your .hgrc.

[extensions]
extdiff =

You can then run hg extdiff -p difft instead of hg diff (assumes the difft binary is on your $PATH).

You can also define an alias to run difftastic with hg. Add the following to your .hgrc to run difftastic with hg dft.

[extdiff]
cmd.dft = difft
# You can add further options which will be passed to the command line, e.g.
# opts.dft = --background light

All options of hg diff are also supported by hg dft; for example, hg dft --stat will show statistics of changed lines and hg dft -r 42 -r 45 will show the diff between two revisions.

hg log -p

Mercurial does not have a way of changing the default diff tool, at least to the author's knowledge.

If you just want to view the diff of the most recent commit, you can use the following.

hg dft -r .^ -r .

This is equivalent to hg log -l 1 -p, although it does not show the commit message.