Difftastic

MIT structural/AST diff that understands syntax

Rust / Terminal · OSS/MIT · 26k

Reviewed 2026-09-13 · last push 2026-10-16 · repo checked 2026-10-19

What's Good

MIT. Wilfred/difftastic (`difft`). tree-sitter structural compare: ignore formatting-only churn, match delimiters, real line numbers. Git-configurable as an external diff. Homepage difftastic.wilfred.me.uk; source github.com/Wilfred/difftastic.

The Catch

Vs delta (syntax-highlight *pager* for git diffs): difftastic is a *structural AST diff*, not a pretty pager over unified diff. Unsupported or huge files fall back to line-oriented. Language coverage is wide but not infinite — unknown formats lose the AST trick.

Verdict

MIT structural diff. Free forever; use when the AST changed, not just the whitespace.

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