FabCH

Depends on what exactly you mean by word files and what exact format is used.

It will diff OpenOffice compatible files.

Ok I had a deeper look at twain now.

If I understand your goal correctly, you are looking to especially focus on the visual part of the diff and provide a nice UI for it, and you would like to use OmniDiff as a library?

If so, then let's talk. I have been delaying the design of the API because nobody has a use for it yet, so it is mostly driven by the needs of the CLI/TUI at the moment.

Ping me on my email if you want.

Unfortunately that is a comparison I will not be doing because BeyondCompare is paid closed-source software.

You need to maximize the size of the residual tree sent to the final APTED step.

I actually don’t know how to do that and stay under a bounded edit distance.

Alternatively, you can crash it if you just encode the entire “Star Trek - In the pale moonlight” episode as a sequence of bytes in a const int array in C++.

It’s in the research/ directory.

Fair warning: the true comparison is fairly complex and doesn’t really lend itself to “quick comparison”.

Also, the research is NOT complete.

As soon as you demonstrate editing a file with less :)

Press “n“ or “p” to jump to next/previous difference.

Press ? for the help menu.

Comparing is slightly complicated but roughly speaking:

Difftastic only diffs code, which is only 2/3 of all diffs.

When only measured on stuff difftastic supports:

Difftastic is perfect on 64% of diffs and near-perfect on 17% more.

Omnidiff is perfect on 90% of diffs and near-perfect on 5% more.

Speed is

p50 - 35ms difftastic vs 4ms OmniDiff p99 - 637ms vs 420ms

Difftastic is MIT vs AGPL.

As long as they open source all modifications and follow AGPL to the letter so that anyone can self-host the version they are selling, I’m ok with that.

AGPL totally allows commercial use. You just have to give back.

The CH in FabCH stands for Switzerland :)

… we don’t know what to do with AI copyright either. I assume a referendum will sort it out at some point.

I’m perfectly happy to defend the copyright in the EU/EFTA and CAN/US.

If it’s a small company, it’s not worth it, but then again they are not causing a lot of damage either. If it’s a big company, they will find me unexpectedly resistant to usual legal bullying tactics. I have legal insurance, multiple lawyers as friends and don’t have a job so have loads of time for filing paperwork.

Don't feel dumb. You are just an outlier on the visual preferences.

I actually do TWO solutions for each test case: a minimal diff and a maximal diff. Pressing 'm' in the TUI pops up a settings page where you can choose how the diff works.

I am actively researching how many ways there are to "paint" the same diff and user preferences and non-uniqueness of diffs is something I am super interested in.

If you would like to, it would be super useful for me to know what diff you don't like and why. It would help make the diff better for users with different visual preferences.