DIFFT(1)                                                              DIFFT(1)

NAME
       difft - a structural diff tool that understands syntax

SYNOPSIS
       difft [OPTIONS] OLD-PATH NEW-PATH

       difft [OPTIONS] DIRECTORY-ONE DIRECTORY-TWO

       difft [OPTIONS] FILE-WITH-CONFLICTS

       difft --list-languages

       difft --help

DESCRIPTION
       difftastic (difft) is a CLI diff tool that compares files based on
       their syntax, not line-by-line.  Difftastic produces accurate diffs
       that are easier for humans to read.

   OPTIONS
       --background BACKGROUND
              Set the background brightness.  Difftastic will prefer brighter
              colours on dark backgrounds.

       --byte-limit LIMIT
              Use a line-oriented diff if either input file exceeds this size.

       --check-only
              Report whether there are any changes, but don't calculate them.
              Much faster.

       --color WHEN
              When to use color output.

       --context LINES
              The number of contextual lines to show around changed lines.

       --display MODE
              Display mode for showing results.

              side-by-side: Display the before file and the after file in two
              separate columns, with line numbers aligned according to
              unchanged content.  If a change is exclusively additions or
              exclusively removals, use a single column.

              side-by-side-show-both: The same as side-by-side, but always
              uses two columns.

              inline: A single column display, closer to traditional diff
              display.

              json: Output the results as a machine-readable JSON array with
              an element per file.

       --exit-code
              Set the exit code to 1 if there are syntactic changes in any
              files.  For files where there is no detected language
              (e.g. unsupported language or binary files), sets the exit code
              if there are any byte changes.

       --graph-limit LIMIT
              Use a line-oriented diff if the structural graph exceed this
              number of nodes in memory.

       -h, --help
              Print help information.

       --ignore-comments
              Don't consider comments when diffing.

       --list-languages
              Print the all the languages supported by difftastic, along with
              their extensions.

       --override GLOB:NAME
              Associate this glob pattern with this language, overriding
              normal language detection.  For example:

              $ difft --override='*.c:C++' old.c new.c

              See --list-languages for the list of language names.  Language
              names are matched case insensitively.  Overrides may also
              specify the language "text" to treat a file as plain text.

              This argument may be given more than once.  For example:

              $ difft --override=`CustomFile:json' --override='*.c:text' old.c
              new.c

              To configure multiple overrides using environment variables,
              difftastic also accepts DFT_OVERRIDE_1 up to DFT_OVERRIDE_9.

              $ export DFT_OVERRIDE=`CustomFile:json' $ export
              DFT_OVERRIDE_1=`.c:text' $ export DFT_OVERRIDE_2='.js:javascript
              jsx'

              When multiple overrides are specified, the first matching
              override wins.

       --parse-error-limit LIMIT
              Use a line-oriented diff if the number of parse errors exceeds
              this value.

       --skip-unchanged
              Don't display anything if a file is unchanged.

       --sort-paths
              When diffing a directory, output the results sorted by path.
              This is slower.

       --strip-cr
              Remove any carriage return characters before diffing.  This can
              be helpful when dealing with files on Windows that contain CRLF,
              i.e. ***.

       --syntax-highlight on/off
              Enable or disable syntax highlighting.

       --tab-width NUMSPACES
              Treat a tab as this many spaces.

       -V, --version
              Print version information.

       --width COLUMNS
              Use this many columns when calculating line wrapping.  If not
              specified, difftastic will detect the terminal width.

   DEBUG OPTIONS
       --dump-syntax PATH
              Parse a single file with tree-sitter and display the difftastic
              syntax tree.

       --dump-ts PATH
              Parse a single file with tree-sitter and display the tree-sitter
              parse tree.

MANUAL
       A full HTML manual is available at
       <https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/introduction>.

BUGS
       See GitHub issues at <https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/issues>.

AUTHOR
       Wilfred Hughes me@wilfred.me.uk

                                                                      DIFFT(1)