Usage

File Arguments

Diffing Files

$ difft sample_files/before.js sample_files/after.js

Diffing Directories

$ difft sample_files/dir_before/ sample_files/dir_after/

Difftastic will recursively walk the two directories, diffing files with the same name.

The --skip-unchanged option is useful when diffing directories that contain many unchanged files.

Reading stdin

You can read a file from stdin by specifying - as the file path.

$ cat sample_files/before.js | difft - sample_files/after.js

Language Detection

Difftastic guesses the language used based on the file extension, file name, and the contents of the first lines.

You can override the language detection by passing the --language option. Difftastic will treat input files as if they had that extension, and ignore other language detection heuristics.

$ difft --language cpp before.c after.c

Options

Difftastic includes a range of configuration CLI options, see difft --help for the full list.

Difftastic can also be configured with environment variables. These are also visible in --help.

For example, DFT_BACKGROUND=light is equivalent to --background=light. This is useful when using VCS tools like git, where you are not invoking the difft binary directly.