Probably won’t solve all of your problems, but I like to at least change git’s default pager to delta.

I just have a script that has a few commands with presets to see the differences I care about:

Short diff: git diff -w --ignore-blank-lines --color-words='\w+|.'
Slightly longer diff: git diff -w --ignore-blank-lines

I like vimdiff, since it’s fair quick to collapse and expand code chunks if you know the keyboard shortcuts. Actually, since it’s vim, knowing the keyboard shortcuts is the entire game lol.

I usually have vimdiff open in a horizontal pane in tmux, then use the other horizontal pane to look at other code that the change references. Could I optimize and have everything in a single vim session? Sure, but at that point, I’d also want cscope set up to find references within vim, and I’m now trivial steps away from a full IDE in vim.

… which people do have, and more power to them. But alas, I don’t have the luxury of fastidious optimization of my workflow to that degree.

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that compares files based on their syntax.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

I use https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/ which is well, fantastic. I have it set up as the default diff for Git and it is really nice.

Beyond Compare, the pro version that does 3-way merges and stuff. I tried them all and its the best for a cheap price if you use it a lot.

yeah, I was also after a CLI tool for that because my goto is a 3-way merge in a GUI editor at this moment. I just didn’t find any CLI tool that beats that in usability and visuals (syntax+diff highlighting)

For simple diffs, my favorites are difftastic and Delta.

Gnu diff for the basics or if I want something automating diffs, beyond compare or winmerge if I’m stuck with windows for gui tools.

I’m mainly interested in making code reviews a little easier to manage.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet, here: All future diffs become much easier to read if the team agrees to use a very strict lint tool.

I know, I know. “Code changes should be small.” I’ve already voiced that to my team, yet here we are.

I understand from another Lemmy thread that the tradition is to toss the offending team members’ laptop into the nearest large body of water.

Not a diff, but a merge tool.

https://mergiraf.org/introduction.html

Kdiff3

I use GitLab diffs in single-file-view mode, TortoiseGit Merge when it exceeds what GitLab can reasonably display (including block indent changes I can ignore in TortoiseGit Merge or moves I can better track), and WinMerge (previously I used KDiff) for manual copy-paste text diffing (like copying blocks from the code change diff to compare similar, categorically similar code, or code moves, etc)

The tortoise diff tool when doing most stuff.

Winmerge if I am manually comparing directories (it can do images/pdfs too!)

I use emacs’s magit for git stuff (the bulk of things) and emacs’s ediff for most other things.

Good if you know emacs, but hard to recommend using it for someone who doesn’t.

EDIT: Oh, one exotic utility that’s useful for some rare cases, not really for interactive merging of code — wdiff for word-level diffing. Most code can reasonably be diffed on a line-by-line basis, but that’s not true for some text formats, which can have very long lines. Human, natural language in text format, is one good example.

alias diff='diff --width=$COLUMNS --suppress-common-lines --side-by-side --color=always'