orgdiff

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#+title: OrgDiff #+author: tecosaur

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As we're all aware, one of the lovely things about working in plaintext is that you can run version control over your documents. =git diff= does a perfectly passable job at showing you how your Org files has changed, but what about when you want something richer? Well =latexdiff= is brilliant for LaTeX files, and you can export Org to LaTeX! However, it's a bit of a hassle, you need to

1. Check out an old revision of your repository
2. Export your Org file to LaTeX
3. Fast-forward to the newer version
4. Do /another/ Org export to LaTeX
5. Run =latexdiff= on the two =.tex= files
6. Compile to a PDF, and view it

Gah! This is sounding like a bit of a pain. That's where OrgDiff comes in. It automates all of the above, and provides a few other quality of life improvements, namely:

• Commit selection via the venerable Magit
• Parallel exporting of the two Org files to TeX
• Descriptive forms of the main =latexdiff= options, accessible via a Transient interface
• Automatic TeX compiler-upgrading. I.e., if one document needs LuaLaTeX and the other needs XeLaTeX, then we need to use LuaLaTeX to compile the =latexdiff= result

Along with that we provide some more basic options, like comparing any two Org files without git, just creating the =.tex= diff, or running ~ediff~ on the Org files.

[[file:orgdiff-screenshot.png]]

Do note that while this seems to work, it's quite early on in development, and it shows in the code (lack of documentation, etc.). It seems perfectly usable though 🙂.