119 points by flamestro 4 days ago | 66 comments on HN
| Mild positive Landing Page · v3.7· 2026-02-28 09:52:18 0
Summary Open Source & Information Access Acknowledges
This GitHub repository page presents 'deff,' a Rust-based tool for interactive side-by-side code review of git diffs. The content consists primarily of technical documentation including installation instructions, usage examples, and contributing guidelines. The project's open-source MIT license and publicly accessible code implicitly acknowledge principles of information freedom (Article 19), intellectual property liberalization (Article 17), and collaborative development practices (Articles 23, 26), though the content itself does not directly address or advocate for human rights concerns.
getting users to adopt a new tool with its own incantations is a tough sell. git supports specifying an external pager so folks can plug in alternatives (such as https://github.com/dandavison/delta) while still using the familiar git frontend
I was looking for a good TUI tool for diffs recently, but I'm not sure yet if what I want exists already (and I don't think this tool does it (yet?)). I've been moving my workflow out of VSCode as I'm using TUI-driven coding agents more often lately but one thing I miss from my VSCode/GitHub workflow is the ability to provide a comment on lines or ranges in a diff to provide targeted feedback to the agent. Most diff tools seem to be (rightfully) focused on cleanly visualizing changes and not necessarily iterating on the change.
I admit I haven't looked super hard yet, I settled on configuring git to use delta [0] for now and I'm happy with it, but I'm curious if anyone has a workflow for reviewing/iterating on diffs in the terminal that they'd be willing to share. Also open to being told that I'm lightyears behind and that there's a better mental model for this.
The specific gap side-by-side covers for me is reviewing changes on a remote box without firing up an IDE. Delta is great but keeps the unified format. icdiff does the split view but is pretty barebones. So there's definitely space here.
What nobody's mentioned yet is difftastic. Takes a completely different approach - parses syntax trees instead of lines, so indentation changes and bracket shuffles don't show up as noise. Worth a look if you're comparing options.
Main question I'd have: how does it hold up on large files? 5k+ line diffs are where most of these tools either choke or produce unreadable output. That'd be the test I'd run first.
What I would love to see is "tig" replacement that is:
- even faster, especially if you have couple thousand files and just want to press "u" for some time and see them very quickly all get staged
- has this split-view diff opened for a file
Otherwise tig is one of my favorite tools to quickly commit stuff without too many key presses but with review abilities, i have its "tig status" aliased to "t"
Looks interesting. I'm currently using https://tuicr.dev/ , of which I like that the first screen it shows is the choice of commit range you want to review. Might be something to consider for deff?
looks pretty good at a glance, though I would like to see three views for handling conflicts. Target on the left, source on the right, and the combined result in the middle.
...I really just like the way the Jetbrains IDEs do it, and I wish there were a TUI version that I could launch automatically from the git cli.
It blows my mind that nowadays, some random tools on internet tells you to do "curl -fsSL https://.... | bash" to install some "binary" things and a lot of people will do it without hesitation.
It probably explains why there is so many data leaks recently but it is like we did a 20 years jump back in time in terms of security in just a few years.
I use delta for quick diffs in a shell (along with the -U0 option on git-diff), but in my claude workflow, i have a 3 pane setup in tmux: :| where the right side is a claude session, the top left is emacs opened to magit, and the bottom left is a shell. Magit makes navigating around a diff pretty easy (as well as all the other git operations), and I can dive into anything and hand edit as well.
Not TUI based but I made something called meatcheck. The idea being that the LLM requests a review from the human, you can leave inline comments like a PR review.
Once you submit it outputs to stdout and the agent reads your comments and actions them.
This looks great as well! I personally prefer a bit more context. Thats why I added a bit more of it to deff. It also allows to mark files as reviewed by pressing `r` which is quite handy for my flow.
I personally find vimdiff a bit harder to navigate for my usecase. The reason is that I am context unaware of the file often in larger projects and wanted something that allows me to check all lines in a touched file. However, I have to admit vimdiff comes quite close to what I need and is a great tool!
So I tested this on huge files (checking cargo lock for instance) and it is super fast in the navigation of those. Until now I did not encounter any issue with bigger files (around 4k-6k changes but also only 4k-6k lines).
I was also searching for some time, but most of them did not have enough context for my workflow tbh. So thats why I decided to make deff. Another good one I liked is vimdiff
I get the hesitation :D But the code is open and the install.sh is as minimal as it gets tbh. Still, as said, I get the hesitation. What a time to be alive.
It does not install binaries, it builds the binary by checking out the project basically. You can also do the process manually and use the tool.
I had tried `delta` a few years ago but eventually went with `diff-so-fancy`[1]
The two are kind of similar if I remember correctly, and both offer a lot of config options to change the style and more. I mostly use it for diffs involving long lines since it highlights changes within a line, which makes it easier to spot such edits.
I have an alias set in `~/.gitconfig` to pipe the output of `git diff` (with options) to `diff-so-fancy` with `git diffs`:
One day folks who live inside commandlines and TUIs all day will realize that there's nothing particular about webapps or the sandboxes that they execute in that requires we build exclusively graphical runtimes around them, instead of taking advantage of the same security and distribution model for programs accessible and usable from within terminal emulator.
Public publication of source code, documentation, and examples explicitly facilitates freedom to seek, receive, and impart information; open-source framing treats code as shared knowledge rather than guarded property
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Source code is publicly accessible without authentication or payment barriers
README includes comprehensive documentation, usage examples, and feature descriptions
Repository permits viewing, forking, and cloning by any user; no access restrictions observed
Inferences
Public code publication directly facilitates Article 19's right to seek and impart information
Open-source framing treats software as knowledge commons rather than proprietary information, reinforcing information freedom principles
Open-source collaboration model described in contributing guidelines represents a labor practice that emphasizes voluntary participation and distributed work authority
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
CONTRIBUTING.md file signals community contribution expectations
Repository tracks open issues and pull requests, enabling distributed work participation
Inferences
Open contribution model provides framework for voluntary, non-coerced labor participation by developers
Distributed development authority over code changes reflects collaborative rather than hierarchical work organization
Publicly available source code serves as educational material for software development knowledge; examples and documentation enhance learning accessibility
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Source code is publicly available for study and learning without registration or fees
README includes usage examples and feature explanations serving pedagogical purposes
Inferences
Accessible source code functions as educational resource for software developers seeking to learn implementation patterns
Public documentation and examples reduce barriers to acquiring technical knowledge and skills