I use Mercurial (and bitbucket.org) to track changes to my thesis (yes, I’m writing up, scary thought). Quite naturally, I use LaTeX to typeset my thesis. For LaTeX documents I prefer not have a fixed column width where line breaks are inserted manually. This makes using Mercurial’s standard diff somewhat pointless because it will only show me paragraphs that I edited. Meet wdiff: “The program wdiff is a front end to diff for comparing files on a word per word basis. A word is anything between whitespace. This is useful for comparing two texts in which a few words have been changed and for which paragraphs have been refilled.” I use the following options in order to use wdiff.
[extensions] hgext.extdiff = [extdiff] cmd.wdiff = wdiff opts.wdiff = -a -l
I couldn’t get colour output to work, suggestions welcome.
For colored diff output, I do:
[extensions]
color =
Does that work with wdiff though? IIRC it doesn’t.
This one is better: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/WordDiff