
Eskil – a GUI front end to diff - networked
http://eskil.tcl.tk/
======
haddr
I was recently looking for a fast diff gui, one that would:

\- work well with longer files and long lines (i don't know why many of them
are very slow on larger files)

\- have line wrap option (quite unusual it seems)

\- have diff ignoring whitespaces (you would be surprised that not all diff
guis support this)

\- the best would be to use the same algo that "git diff" does

\- if not then any other that works on character-level.

Of course you may use the vanilla git diff, which is really great (even
outside of git repositories), but it is not as handy as GUI sometimes.

The closest GUI was meld, but it's not perfect either... macvim with some diff
plugin was also good, but not perfect.

~~~
haddr
Ok, checked this one against my diffs, and here's some observations:

\+ eskill has a good set of diff algorithms, char level, word level, etc.

\- lacks line wrapping

\- a bit sluggish (but it's not that bad)

Would recommend trying.

~~~
pspjuth
Eskil creator here. Thanks for the + :-) Line wrapping has been on my low
priority todo list forever, but since it is so rarely needed in my usage it
tends to not happen. Line zoom is enough for the rare circumstances I have
long lines. I'll give it some more thought.

------
ansgri
What are its current or planned advantages to other tools, e.g. Meld?

~~~
pspjuth
Among its less visible advantages, it has a lot of ways to resolve tricky
diffs, which comes in handy sometimes. Like manually aligning lines, and
applying search/replace filters. Try the built in tutorial to see some of it.

But the main advantage is that it presents diffs the way I like it, naturally
since I wrote it ;-)

~~~
doozy
Fossil diff is the killer feature for me. Thanks for your great work.

------
rdtsc
I've been using kdiff3 for years (it is also my default git mergetool). I see
others use Meld. Ediff (emacs' diff). What are other open source/free tools
like that people use?

------
junke
I like tkdiff and I am wondering why Eskil is not a series of patch on top of
tkdiff instead of a different program. In fact,
[http://wiki.tcl.tk/3773](http://wiki.tcl.tk/3773) says:

    
    
        See also eskil for an extended version of tkdiff.
    
        Eskil is an updated version of tkdiff (still pure tcl) that includes:
    
        ... features ...
    
        I highly recommend eskil over tkdiff. tjk
    

I must be lacking some context, so why not have a single program? Is Eskil
that program and tkdiff obsolete?

~~~
pspjuth
Eskil is a completely unrelated to tkdiff. The only relation is that they both
are written in Tcl/Tk. Don't know why the wiki says what it says.

------
ppurka
This tool looks interesting from the screenshots in the website. I wonder if
some things that diff doesn't do well are handled separately by this tool.

Or, I do not know how to make diff do it well - for example, show added
similar "paragraph" in better context. If I have a for loop and add an
identical for loop after current one, diff will typically show the new one
inserted in between the first part of the existing for loop and the last line
of the existing for loop. The perforce diff client seems to get this right and
shows the new for loop inserted after the current one.

Aside from that, what I miss in some GUI diff clients is the way vimdiff
works. By default, vimdiff collapses the similar areas and shows only the diff
parts noncollapsed. This is very useful when I am looking at a diff of a large
file and the diff portions are far apart. It helps get a quick overview of the
differences in the entire file.

------
lsh
Meld has become flaky in recent months (years?) after the switch to GTK3.
Scrolling often gets 'stuck', mercurial support has regressions and
performance is much slower on newer hardware than I remember it being on
something barebones. I'm definitely looking at Eskill as an alternative. A
graphical diff is just one of those tools I can't live without.

------
aorth
Not so great on Mac OS X. For remote diffs over SSH I don't mind vimdiff to be
honest, but sometimes I just want a graphical diff locally. I miss meld from
GNU/Linux and can't bring myself to brew install it because GTK on Mac OS X is
ugh.

~~~
jurip
Just to be sure: you're aware of FileMerge/opendiff? It's installed by
default. It's not the greatest, but it's there.

~~~
aorth
Wow, I didn't know about opendiff. Indeed, I will use that when I need
something graphical. Cheers!

~~~
wruza
Hmm, I don't know what's with meld/etc, but I always prefer MacVim (mvim -d)
over FileMerge on mac.

------
wruza
Being vimer, I always fail to see the breakthrough in such news.

~~~
kwhitefoot
Similarly as an Emacs user it seems that all the shiny graphical tools are no
better than ediff.

------
weinerk
Can it diff remote locations? sftp://user@host/path

~~~
pspjuth
No, but that sounds like a useful feature to add. Thanks.

------
Animats
Looks like the visual diff that came with Microsoft SourceSafe.

------
fithisux
I'will definitely use it. Tcl/Tk fan.

~~~
dmd
Out of curiosity, why does it matter what language it's written in? How would
that in any way affect one's decision to use or not use it?

------
hkjgkjy
Is it better than vimdiff?

~~~
wruza
vimdiff is just perfect. How can $subj be any better than perfect? That can be
only reason why your [effectively unconstructive] comment gets [constructively
explained] downvotes.

