Word by word diff for Sourcetree
Asked by Jackson Del Bonis-O'Donnell:

Is it possible to make the internal diff view for Sourcetree display word by word differences like the command line version of git: git diff --color-words? This would be VERY helpful for working with LaTex files.


Answers:
author: stevestreeting
body: It's not possible right now, sorry. Parsing colour control characters outside a real terminal can be tricky.

comments: author: Jackson Del Bonis-O'Donnell
body: Thanks. I do hope that they can implement it in the future!


author: Scott Marcy
body: If you're parsing the output of 'git diff' directly, wouldn't the addition of --word-diff=porcelain make parsing reliable?

I could have saved myself a lot of grief recently with word-level diff'ing. I'd love to still see the entire line be highlighted, but have the word-level changes be highlighted in a stronger color, like BBEdit does.

Thanks!


author: Peter Kling
body: Just wondering, any updates on this? Or still not feasible to implement any time soon?


author: greg donovan
body: This is critical to have


author: Russell Trafford
body: This is now 3 years on. Can we re-visit this issue and see if its now possible to implement?

If git command line can do it, surely SourceTree should be able to?

Also, Gitlab Web UI interface seems to be able to identify which words in a line have changed.


author: Russell Trafford
body: This is now 3 years on. Can we re-visit this issue and see if its now possible to implement?

If git command line can do it, surely SourceTree should be able to?

Also, Gitlab Web UI interface seems to be able to identify which words in a line have changed.

I have raised this as a feature request as this still does not seem to have been implemented 3 years on (2016).

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREE-3598>

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREEWIN-5113>

comments: author: Toland Hon
body: SRCTREE-3598 has been marked a duplicate of:

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SRCTREE-888>

\^-- vote for this one


author: Vantigate
body: Parsing color control characters may be difficult to do outside of the CLI, but can't you do it a different way? If gitk can do it, can't you just look at how they do it in their source, and then adapt it to your program?


author: hifismith
body: The "Diff Colours" option (OS X version) looks like there are color schemes built for word-by-word diffs (light green, light red, dark green, dark red), but it's not implemented?


author: Chen Han
body: it sucks, github and vscode are supported this features so long ago, what the PM 's plan ?


author: Joon Ro
body: Yes this would be very helpful for LaTeX/LyX files.


author: blockloop
body: gitk has this functionality. It can be passed in via command line or changed in the gui. It has both color diff and porcelain. I'd love to see this in SourceTree.


author: stefek99
body: I'm writing a lot of front-end code and wrapping some elements in \<div\> and indenting makes all the lines red...

Can we have **--color-words** ?


author: Julian B
body: I would also love this functionality, would be really helpful!


author: benomatis
body: SmartGit/HG does that perfectly, but I hate the look of the rest of the app. This is really the only thing I'm missing from SourceTree!