Vim diff

I was digging through Vim's documentation, and came across the help article diff.txt. It turns out that Vim implements a visual diff feature, which shows the 'difference between two to eight versions of the same file'.

I occasionally need to find the differences between two files, and have historically used diff for this. Unfortunately, I find the output quite hard to parse:

$ diff file_1 file_2
32c32
< TODO: screenshot of diff
---
> ![Image showing what a diff looks like in Vim][vim-diff]
41a42,43
>
> [vim-diff]: /img/posts/vim-diff/diff.png

Vim's visual diff is much clearer to me:

$ vim -d file_1 file_2

Image showing what a diff looks like in Vim

Vim sets some options to make browsing the diff easier:

  1. scrollbind is set to on, so when you scroll through one file, the other will scroll alongside it
  2. Sections of common text are hidden with a fold

There are commands for jumping between diffs, and copying text from one file to the other. You can find out more by typing :help diff.txt from inside Vim.