Tool for visualisation of diffs generated from various VCS systems.

QShowDiff is simple tool for colourful visualisation of diffs. QShowDiff was created because I was missing some tool which would do only this one thing. It's true that there are programs such as KDiff3 or Kompare, however these programs are too complicated for a task as simple as viewing diffs.

QShowDiff does only one thing and that is a visualisation of diff. It does not compare two files or directories - for that there are many tools that surely do the task very well. And that is the reason why QShowDiff was created. I needed a program which will do only one thing - colorful visualisation of diffs. Nothing more and nothing less.

QShowDiff is able to visualise diff generated from various version control systems such as Git, Subversion or Bazaar and is also able to recognize them by itself.

QShowDiff is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3. The GNU General Public License v3 should be available at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

For compilation you need only Qt4 devel files.

To create man page you need pod2man and gzip programs.

For compilation just type:

  $ make

If you want to change default codec used by Qt library. Set up DEFAULT_CODEC variable in make command. For example:

  $ make DEFAULT_CODEC=utf-8

For installation to /usr/local/ type:

  $ sudo make install

And if you want to change destination dir:

  $ sudo make PREFIX=/path/to/dir install

QShowDiff is simple command line tool which reads diff from standard input and visualise it. What type of diff is it (and thus how to parse it) is recognized automatically or can be specified on command line.

qshowdiff [options] [type]

If type of input is not specified QShowDiff tries to recognize input by itself.

• --text-codec codec_name Text codec that will be used.
• --available-codecs Print out all available codecs.

Currently available types of input: git, bzr, svn, diffr, diff.

To show last changes in git repository (qshowdiff recognize by itself type of input):

  $ git diff | qshowdiff

To genrate patch from svn and visualise them later (with exactly specified type of input):

  $ svn diff > changes.patch
  $ cat changes.patch | qshowdiff svn