difftools, ‘bzr diff --using footool’ , and ‘diffuse’

[Stephen Ward]

What Gary said.  

Plus, it provides a way to tweak the behavior to account for peculiarities of 
particular tools (e.g. the Mac 'opendiff' tool, which is run without the 
normal cleanup of the temp directories, for reasons I won't bore you with 
here).

Certainly, for many users, the builtin version of 'diff --using' works 
perfectly - and if that meets your needs, there's no reason to complicate your 
setup with any additional plugins.


There are two general classes of diff tools:  list-oriented and tree-oriented.  
When you have a bunch of diffs, the list-oriented tools will show them to you 
one file at a time; the tree-oriented tools (meld, kdiff3, kompare, ...) can 
show you the whole collection at once.  That let's you jump around between 
files, and generally gives you a better overall picture (in my opinion).

For my own usage, I still find the plugin version provides a more natural 
workflow; bringing up the GUI repeatedly just feels wrong to me.  But roughly 
half of the widely-used diff tools have a list-oriented workflow, so clearly 
this is a matter of personal preference.

Regards,

Steve