Ecosyste.ms: Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

Awesome Lists | Featured Topics | Projects

https://github.com/fluffynuts/diff-buddy


https://github.com/fluffynuts/diff-buddy

Last synced: 19 days ago
JSON representation

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

        
Diff Buddy!

---



This is a small utility to help with diffs on really large pull requests. To use:

1. Clone the repo you're looking at (add and fetch all remotes, if necessary)

2. Run diff-buddy - if you run from within the repo, it will default to diff against master

3. Filter down results iteratively at the command-line with subsequent runs until

    you end up seeing a useful changeset

4. Run in review mode with your prior commandline and `--review` to comment on files. 

    When a review is complete, your comments can be copied to the clipboard to add to the pull request you're 

    reviewing. Reviews can be resumed - just quit and say you're not done with the review. Next time,

    diff-buddy will attempt to pick up where you left off.



Quick-start

---

1. `npm ci`

2. Publish for your platform: `npm run publish-win32`

3. cd into the `bin` folder, or add it to your path

4. start using diff-buddy (:



Options

---



diff-buddy has help which can be invoked from the command-line with `--help`:



```

diff-buddy {args}



-a, --at [number]               Show the diff at the provided index only

-f, --from-branch [text]        Starting branch for the diff (master)

-h, --help                      shows this help

-I, --ignore-files [text]       Regular expressions for files to ignore completely

-i, --ignore-lines [text]       Regular expressions for lines to ignore when deciding on interesting files

    --ignore-whitespace         Ignore whitespace changes, even those spanning multiple lines, when deciding on interesting files

-l, --limit [number]            Limit the number of files to list (2147483647)

-o, --offset [number]           Start printing from this offset (0)

-r, --repo [text]               (.)

-S, --show-indexes              Show the numeric index for each file

    --show-operations           Show the operation which this file has undergone: (A)dded, (D)eleted, (M)odified, (R)enamed

-s, --show-patches              Whether or not to show patches for files

-t, --to-branch [text]          Later branch to diff with



Negate any flag argument with --no-{option}

```



(note that flags can be negated with `--no-`, eg `--no-show-indexes`)



Building filters

---



The whole point of diff-buddy is to reduce the number of files you need to look at to understand

a large pull request. Sometimes, a pull-request has many files which have changed but in an

insignificant way, eg because of a namespace rename or whitespace formatting.



The process, then, is as follows, for slimming down what would be interesting when

comparing some satellite branch in a local repo to master:

1. Check out the satellite branch of interest

2. Make sure you've got the latest: `git pull --rebase`

3. Start with a plain old `diff-buddy.exe` run in the repository to get a feel for the size of the diff

4. Scan for files which aren't of interest - perhaps you don't care about test files:

    - `diff-buddy --ignore-files Tests.*`

    - note that --ignore-files and --ignore-lines take regex strings: when working on unix shells like

        bash and zsh, you may need to surround these with single-quotes to prevent the shell from

        expanding them

5. Enable patches and start looking at smaller clumps of files:

    - `diff-buddy --ignore-files Tests.* --show-patches --limit 10 --offset 0`

    - increase the offset by 10 at a time and look for uninteresting patterns to exclude

6. Exclude files with uninteresting changes:

    - `diff-buddy --ignore-files Tests.* --ignore-lines ^using --show-patches --limit 10 --offset 10`

        - this ignores files where the only changes are to `using` statements, still

            only outputting 10 files, after an offset of 10

7. Add to the ignores for a few iterations until you can do

    - `diff-buddy --ignore-files {...} --ignore-lines {...}`

    - and end up with a small enough set of files that you are willing to review full patches for

8. Now run with your prior commandline and `--review` to see each file, one-by-one