Git: Diffing With Patience

The default diff algorithm used by Git is pretty good, but it can get mislead by larger, complex changesets. The result is a noisier, misaligned diff output.

If you’d like a diff that is generally a bit cleaner and can afford a little slow down (you probably can), you can instead use the patience algorithm which is described as such:

Patience Diff, instead, focuses its energy on the low-frequency high-content lines which serve as markers or signatures of important content in the text. It is still an LCS-based diff at its core, but with an important difference, as it only considers the longest common subsequence of the signature lines:

Find all lines which occur exactly once on both sides, then do longest common subsequence on those lines, matching them up.

You can set this as the default algorithm by adding the following lines to your ~/.gitconfig file:

[diff]
    algorithm = patience

or it can be set from the command line with:

git config --global diff.algorithm patience

Via jbranchaud/til.