It's Difftastic!

Difftastic is an experimental structured diff tool that compares files based on their syntax.

It is very much unfinished. It works reasonably on very parenthesised data (lisps, JSON), it works sometimes on other languages with sufficient parentheses (Rust, JS), and falls back to a line-oriented diff otherwise.

See config/syntax.toml to see how languages are defined.

The wiki includes a thorough overview of alternative diffing techniques and tools.

Testing with Git

[diff]
        tool = difftastic

[difftool "difftastic"]
        cmd = ~/projects/difftastic/target/debug/difftastic "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

You can then run git difftool -y to see the current repo changes in difftastic.