WinMerge - ignore all whitespace including newlines and formatting changes

Question

How can I ignore "code style" changes while using WinMerge as a difftool? Specifically across two commits.

So that

thing
{
  a,
  b
}

and

thing { a, b }

would be treated as identical.

Essentially this question, but for winmerge rather than diff.

.gitconfig:

[diff]
    tool = winmerge
[difftool]
    prompt = false
[difftool "winmerge"]
    cmd = "$HOME/scripts/winmerge.sh" "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"
[mergetool]
    prompt = false
    keepBackup = false
    keepTemporaries = false
[merge]
    tool = winmerge
[mergetool "winmerge"]
    cmd = "'C:/Program Files (x86)/WinMerge/WinMergeU.exe'" -e -u -fm -dl \"Local\" -dr \"Remote\" "$LOCAL" "$MERGED" "$REMOTE"

(winmerge.sh just calls WinMergeU.exe -e -u -wr "$1" "$2")

None of the command line options seem to fit, and I think line filters won't work because they are per-line.

user_4111860 · Answer

This option works for me:

WinMerge -> Edit -> Options -> Compare -> General: Ignore blank lines; Ignore carriage return differences (Windows/Unix/Mac)

etc.

The answer was taken from https://superuser.com/questions/174275/can-i-compare-only-file-contents

user_116156 · Answer

You could add a .gitattributes for your file. This would run a tool to normalize/beautify/prettify both files before comparison.

This will run .json files through json_pp before compare:

echo "*.json diff=json" >> .gitattributes
git config diff.json.textconv json_pp

Check out git documentation for details: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes

Source: https://t-a-w.blogspot.com/2016/05/sensible-git-diff-for-json-files.html

WinMerge - ignore all whitespace including newlines and formatting changes

2 Answers