Feature Request: Filter out whitespace diffs, including newline changes.

[MHebes]

When comparing two commits, I would like to ignore any code style changes so I can just see the actual differences.

i.e. this change:

thing
{
  a,
  b
}

to

thing { a, b }

would not be highlighted as a difference. For my use case, ignoring newlines would be sufficient.

I anticipate this could be done relatively easily by ignoring all newlines while comparing the files (i.e. treating them both as single-line files for the diff).

[jbress]

I'm looking for this aswell. It would be great to have this feature in the near future. Meanwhile, is there any workaround ?

[hhkk]

this is critical IMO

[marcstern]

Any chance to get this? That would save my life (and all developers' one wanting to compare branches)

[MHebes]

Since I made this issue I’ve learned a few things:

1. This will likely never be implemented in winmerge or any other textual line-based diff tool, since it inherently uses line-by-line diffing for sake of speed and chunk matching.
2. There are tools that do this. They do the diffing based on syntax rather than lines. I’ve been using difftastic with success. It doesn’t really do merging, but it’s diff output is quite nice. It’s slow and a memory hog though, so it helps to have multiple tools.