Making diff output more readable

I'm looking for a tool that will take diff / debdiff output (and more specifically, the output of this script) and display the result of the comparison in a highly readable, graphical way. Any pointers would be appreciated.

Ideally, it would be the GTK+, FOSS equivalent of MDR.

Meld, Diffuse and similar software are not fit for this purpose, since they're intended to work standalone, and don't take input from stdin.

Solution 1:

Kompare can do this (and is the best GUI diff-viewer IMO):

./whatchanged package_name | kompare -

Note the '-' given as the input file argument. Most *nix programs have this interface to accept piped input, so you can probably use whichever one you like.

Solution 2:

If you only have a console, colordiff is a quite good solution.

To install it, run this command sudo apt-get install colordiff in a terminal

Solution 3:

I like using vim's internal syntax highlighting as a pager, so that I can view colorized diffs. For example, putting this in your .bashrc:

sudo apt-get install vim
alias vless='vim -u /usr/share/vim/vimcurrent/macros/less.vim'

(And then re-source your .bashrc with . ~/.bashrc.) Then you can run vless as your pager:

vless /path/to/your.diff

It's not graphical, but it is at least highlighted.

Solution 4:

Although a KDE application it can be installed without TOO many dependencies, kdiff is an awesome diff editing / merge tool.