Side-by-side diffs for Mercurial (hg) & icdiff revisited
Posted
A while back I told you how to get side-by-side diffs in Mercurial using icdiff. Turns out the author of icdiff has added the --recursive flag to make the tool accept directories and diff the contents of the files within. New setup instructions follow.
1. Install icdiff
Same as before: Download and install icdiff, making sure /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH.
2. Setup Mercurial
Next, lets configure Mercurial so that it knows about icdiff. We'll also set the default pager for all commands to less. Add the following to your ~/.hgrc.
[extensions]
extdiff=
pager=
[extdiff]
cmd.icdiff=icdiff
# extdiff passes two directories to the diff command
# --recursive tells icdiff to treat the two params as directories
# and recursively diff their contents.
# -- line-numbers shows line numbers on both sides
opts.icdiff=--recursive --line-numbers
[pager]
# Setting the variable LESS is like passing those options to less.
# In this case, -F (quit if fits on screen), and -R (pass through control chars,
# required for color output)
pager = LESS='FR' less
# Use pager for these commands only. Add any commands you use here.
attend = icdiff,diff,status,log
You can now replace diff in your Mercurial commands with icdiff, and it will do a side-by-side diff instead of inline.
3. Aliases (optional)
Finally, since hg icdiff is of course too long, add the following aliases to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:
# side-by-side diffs for uncommitted files
alias ic='hg icdiff'
# diff all changes since the base revision, including uncommitted
# (from master if you are using bookmarks, for example)
alias ica='hg icdiff -r .^'
# diff the existing changes, excluding uncommitted
alias ice='hg icdiff --ch .'