colordiff: A difference in color

Remember my unnatural predilection for anything in color? You have to admit I’m right on this point. After all, which would you rather look at?

At the top, diff. At the bottom, colordiff. The choice should be an easy one.

The man page describes colordiff as a perl wrapper for diff, and that’s very true. As a matter of fact, it’s so tightly wound around diff that if you ask for colordiff --help, you get the output from diff --help. 😕 And I know there’s no difference because I used colordiff to show the difference between diff --help and colordiff --help, and there was no difference. See what I mean? ❓

Clear as mud.

colordiff has its own rc file, installed by default at /etc/colordiff in the Arch version. I would advise you to copy that into .colordiffrc, and customize the colors there, but if you’re just one of those weirdos who runs a black-on-white terminal emulator, you’d do just as well to copy /etc/colordiff-lightbg into your .colordiffrc file instead.

That’s about all I can think about with colordiff. It stays very tight to the original tool while still giving you a small measure of customization, and that will probably keep you happy in your pursuit of differences. 😉