How to show diffs between two buffers in Emacs?
When two buffers are compared for differences, M-x ediff-buffers does not indicate the specific characters that have changed within a word (ie “character-level” diffs). Most modern diff tools will show the diffs within a word. Emacs seems to be missing this important (or obviously useful?) feature by default.
When to use a diff within a line?
That allows the diff to synchronise itself on common passages in files much better, especially when files are mostly different with only a few blocks of common words. For example when comparing text for for plagiarism, or re-use. dwdiff was later created from wdiff. But dwdiff uses that text reformatting function to good effect in dwfilter.
Why does diff say two files are the same?
I have two files which look identical to me (including trailing whitespaces and newlines) but diff still says they differ. Even when I do a diff -y side by side comparison the lines look exactly the same. The output from diff is the whole 2 files. Any idea what’s causing it?
How to show a diff between buffers in Ediff?
Update Here’s M-x ediff-buffers diff1 diff2, using emacs -Q to ensure that my theme is not interferring: Here’s the same text pasted into Meld: This feature is called “refining” in Ediff. You can hit * to refine the current hunk, or @ to turn on automatic refining whenever you move to a different hunk.
Is there a way to compare two buffers in Vim?
Vim’s diff mode allows us to easily compare the contents of two (or more) buffers. We can start Vim in diff mode using the vimdiff command, or if Vim is already running we can switch to diff mode using the :diffthis command.
How to get character level in Python using diff?
Python’s difflib can do this. The documentation includes an example command-line program for you. The exact format is not as you specified, but it would be straightforward to either parse the ndiff-style output or to modify the example program to generate your notation.