Visual diffing

Think it is a little difficult to read the raw output of rcsdiff? You're not the only one! There are some cool programs out there to help you visualize the differences.

For printing purposes, you can do the following:

rcsdiff project1.c | diffpp project1.c | enscript -G2re -o project1_diff.ps

This creates a Postscript file called /tmp/test.ps, which you can either print (if the Linux/Unix box is connected to a printer), or convert to PDF for easier online viewing (you still to download it first). To convert a Postscript file to PDF, do the following:

ps2pdf project1_diff.ps

A new file, project1_diff.pdf is created. You can, then, download and use a PDF viewer (such as Acrobat Reader) to open it.

For online viewing, you can do the following:

rcsdiff -y project1.c | less

This makes rcsdiff display in two columns, so you can easily see the differences in a side-by-side fashion.

You can also try out the following:

rcsdiff project1.c | colordiff | less

for color-coded output. I find colordiff not to be very helpful.

If you have a GUI frontend, do the following:

tkdiff project1.s

to display the differences in a GUI window. This is, by far, the best option. However, you do need to get the GUI working first. tkdiff is already included in KNOPPIX.