Tag Archives: filemerge

Diff Tools, Redux

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Some time ago, I mentioned here how I like to use colordiff. Well, on a Mac I actually prefer Apple’s FileMerge GUI diff tool, which is is part of the Xcode command line tools, and accessible from the command line as opendiff.)

I recently discovered diffy, which is similar to colordiff, but offers a -split option that gives you the side-by-side effect of opendiff.

Even more interesting to me, however, is diffr, which is a “diff postprocessor” that shows the differences within a specific line. You run diff -u ... | diffr to see what you want.

Thousands of words worth of pictures:

plain old diff
colordiff (aliased to diff because duh)
diffy -s split
diff -u … | diffr
FileMerge, invoked from the command line

Update: I appear to have been wrong. Evidently, opendiff is part of Xcode proper, not the command line tools. Which means I won’t be using it in general, because it’s freaking huge.

Xcode and Bandwidth Caps

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For a long time, I’ve been in the habit of installing Xcode on Macs, even though I wasn’t developing software. (Partly because I wasn’t sure what I needed to run Fink/MacPorts/Homebrew, and partly because I think FileMerge is pretty sweet, even if it’s the last thing on this list of features.) But lately, the typical Xcode update is like 7 GB, and I just don’t need it. 

7.6 GB worth of awesomeness. :-/

So I wanted to know how to get rid of these monstrous downloads. And I found out. First, you get rid of Xcode. But that’s only step one:

$ cc
 xcrun: error: active developer path ("/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer") does not exist
 Use sudo xcode-select --switch path/to/Xcode.app to specify the Xcode that you wish to use for command line developer tools, or use xcode-select --install to install the standalone command line developer tools.
 See man xcode-select for more details.

So, next, you have to get rid of the command line tools and reinstall them:

$ rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
$ xcode-select --install

UPDATE: When that doesn’t work, you read further down that page and find the correct answer:

$ sudo xcode-select -s /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools