Any visual diff in Linux console?

user_232600 0
Viewed 55826

Many years ago I used d32 which was available for DOS and Linux.

Is a non-GUI visual diff available for Linux like this one?

Any others than Vim and Emacs (Vim and Emacs are too powerful :-) )

diff
13 Answers

I'm using vimdiff. Or there is also sdiff.

user_2160630
user_2259190

Vim comes with vimdiff which works pretty well...

user_1361940

VS Code has beautiful diffing:

code --diff file1.ext file2.ext

(Though it is a GUI.)

user_1527110

Personally I like to use vimdiff. But if you don't know vim that won't be that helpful to you.

user_1758300

Midnight Commander (mc) has built-in diff and a lot more useful functions. Try:

sudo apt install mc

user_57587510

Your title mentions "Linux console" but your question mentions meld, which is a GUI application. It might help answerers if you could clarify this.

In GUI apps, meld is still pretty much the standard. It works well, it's reasonably pretty and intuitive.

If you're really limited to using the console (i.e. text-only) then apart from the diff utilities built into editors like vim and emacs you could also try the original command line utility diff. I find it very useful to use the -y option to display files side-by-side, and there are other options I've used to display "unified" diffs and to precisely set the amount of context around matched differences. If you pipe diff's output into less you can browse with fair convenience.

user_1722110

vimdiff will do what you want. Vim is installed by default on most linux distros, so you probably do not even need to install anything.

user_2064170

Emacs has a built-in visual diff tool: M-x ediff.

user_130510

Try meld. It's very light and intuitive.

user_48377680
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