Wilfred
No way to make non-syntactic changes visible
(1) A description of the issue. A screenshot is often helpful too.
When there's only a non-syntactic diff (eg whitespace in perl, java, python source code), difft shows no syntactic changes.
However, for usage with git diff, I would like to see even those changes.
(2) A copy of what you're diffing.
n/a
(3) The version of difftastic you're using (see difft --version) and
your operating system.
$ difft -V
Difftastic 0.55.0 (built with rustc 1.75.0)
Running on MacOS, aarch64
I agree this is sometimes useful, but it's quite hard to do with an AST diff. It might fit into the patch mode I'm looking at right now, but overall this is lower priority right now I'm afraid.
I also need this, as a reviewer I need to see diffs that are only style, because I want to spot a style deviation from coding rules, or trailing spaces, or mix or tab/spaces for indentations.
I do understand that it might be hard to do with an AST, but I would argue that it can be a 3 steps job:
- first do the AST aware diff
- then do a normal text diff (you might just use the venerable diff tool here)
- both tools outputs as chunks, we should be able to merge both outputs. If a chunk is covered by both, just ouput the AST aware one.
