difftastic/CHANGELOG.md

0.12 (unreleased)

No changes yet.

0.11

Parsing

Improved handling of paired delimiters, particularly in C, C++ and C#.

Improved word splitting in when diffing similar comments (it's now more granular).

Fixed a rare issue where single-item lists were flattened.

Diffing

Diff calculations are now greedier when syntax nodes are identical, making diffing significantly faster when most syntax nodes are the same.

Integration

Added support for Mercurial, see this section in the manual for instructions.

Display

Added basic syntax highlighting for comments (dimmed) and keywords (bold) in unchanged source code.

Characters that don't have a position in the parsed syntax tree are now displayed in purple, to make bugs more obvious. Previously they were dimmed.

0.10.1

Build

Fix compilation on macOS where the C++ compiler defaulted to a version of C++ older than C++14.

0.10

Parsing

Added a C parser.

Added a C++ parser. Difftastic prefers the C++ parser for .h files. Please file a bug if you see issues.

Added a C# parser.

Added a Haskell parser.

Removed legacy regex-based parsing backend.

Diffing

Some additional runtime optimisations.

Manual

Added a chapter on difficult cases for tree diff algorithms.

0.9

Parsing

Added TypeScript parser and TSX parser. Added Elixir parser.

The following extensions are now associated with Clojure: .bb, .boot, .clj, .cljc, .clje, .cljs, .cljx, .edn, .joke and .joker.

Fixed an issue with parsing integer values in CSS with units, e.g. 123px.

Improved parsing of Rust punctuation like & and :: inside macro invocations. Improved handling of |closure_param| and [ ] delimiters in Rust.

The line-based parser for text files now uses word-level diffs.

Diffing

Optimised Dijkstra implementation, improving runtime performance.

Display

Side-by-side displays now uses the same width for the left and right columns, regardless of the content.

Internals

Difftastic is now a library with a main binary. No APIs are considered stable for external usage. This is intended to make benchmarking easier.

0.8

Git integration

Fixed a crash on removing whole files.

Parsing

Tree-sitter parsing is now the default, unless the environment variable DFT_RX is set.

Tree-sitter parser: Improved handling of string literals. Improved matching of delimiters.

Added Python parser.

Added Java parser.

JSON (legacy parser): fixed parsing string literals (broken in 0.7).

Removed Scheme support, as there's no tree-sitter parser available.

Display

Fixed crashes on files with non-ASCII characters on long lines.

Fixed an issue where multiline comments were not highlighted correctly.

Improved display to better use the whole width when whole files are added or removed.

Command Line Interface

Removed the unused --lang argument.

Difftastic now handles writing to a closed pipe (SIGPIPE) gracefully rather than crashing.

Difftastic now has some debugging logs available. RUST_LOG=trace will show information on the route found during graph solving.

0.7

Git integration

Fixed issues when adding/removing a whole file meant that difftastic didn't display anything.

Fixed a crash on renaming a file.

Colour is now enabled when using git with a pager.

Display

Side-by-side display now uses "..." for column numbers when aligning lines. This makes hunks more obvious, but hunks now also have two blank lines between them to make it clearer.

Fixed an issue where screen width was not shared evenly by LHS and RHS.

Side-by-side display will now use the full width of the screen when using a pager (i.e. if stdout is a not a TTY).

Side-by-side display now handles whole file additions better, preferring a single column display.

Display width calculations are now based on the longest line visible in the diff, not the longest line in the file.

Parsing

Added tree-sitter parsers. These have known bugs, but you can try them by setting the environment variable DFT_TS=y.

Fixed handling of -> in Rust.

Diffing

Difftastic will now prefer matching up comments that are similar (according to levenshtein distance).

Contiguous syntax logic now considers close delimiter positions, so [ \n ]; now treats the ; atom as contiguous.

Fixed an issue where diffs would prefer prefer a low depth change on a delimiter over a delimiter that gave contiguous changes.

Command Line Interface

Removed the --width argument.

Added debug options --dump-syntax and --dump-ts for viewing parse trees. The output of these files may change without notice.

0.6

Parsing

Fixed handling of @, < and > in elisp.

Fixed crash on binary files. Difftastic now simply shows "binary" for files that don't look like text.

Added a basic Go parser.

Diffing

Fixed an issue where comment replacements were not detected.

Changed words in comments are now only highlighted when comments are relatively similar (according to their Levenshtein distance).

Multiline comments are now considered unchanged if only their indentation changes.

Improved alignment for lines at the beginning of a changed group of lines.

Improved horizontal spacing between before and after code shown.

Fixed an issue where source code containing tab characters was not correctly aligned.

Command Line Interface

Removed unused --inline and --context arguments.

Fixed crash when called with no arguments.

0.5

Parsing

Fixed a crash on parsing non-ASCII source files. Fixed a crash on files without an extension. Fixed crashes on empty files.

Input files that aren't valid UTF-8 are now replaced with <20> rather than giving up.

Improved parsing for Rust punctuation.

Improved parsing for OCaml punctuation, including := and method!.

Improved parsing for Emacs Lisp symbols containing + and =, and punctuation of #, . and &.

Improved parsing for Scheme symbols containing =, and punctuation of # and ..

Improved parsing of = and & in Clojure.

Improved parsing of :, ,, and constants in JSON.

Improved parsing of string literals in all languages, supporting escaped delimiters such as "\"" and removing incorrect support for single-quoted strings in JSON.

Diffing

Reduced memory usage when diffing.

Difftastic now highlights word-level changes between comments.

Diffing now prefers contiguous nodes even when entering a list, so (foo is considered contiguous.

Large AST trees with very few common nodes are now considered wholly novel, rather than trying to match up the few common nodes. This avoids nonsensical diffs when toplevel function A is completely replaced with function B and they only have something trivial in common (e.g. the function keyword).

Command Line Interface

Improved --help.

Integration

It's now possible to use difftastic with git diff and git show!

0.4

Parsing

Improved parsing for Rust macro definitions and punctuation.

Improved parsing for OCaml punctuation, and added .mli as an OCaml file extension.

Diffing

Diff calculation is now significantly faster.

Difftastic now considers nesting depth when comparing AST nodes, and tries to match nodes with similar nesting levels.

Difftastic now prefers marking multiple items on the same line as novel, rather than adjacent items on different lines. This helps avoid sliders, where the diff chooses a keyword on the 'wrong' side.

Fixed an issue where complex diffs would not display some unchanged lines.

Robustness

Fixed a crash when diff context included the first line.

Fixed a crash when plain text content contained certain non-ASCII characters.

0.3

Diffs are now displayed with unchanged lines aligned to the other side.

Improved Rust parsing to recognise lifetime syntax 'foo, character literals 'x' and punctuation.

Improved punctuation parsing for OCaml and JS.

Fixed an issue where the diff calculated may not be minimal.

Fixed a crash on files with no changes.

0.2

First version using Dijkstra's algorithm for calculating diffs.

0.1

Experimenting with different implementation ideas.