I’ve always liked github’s side-by-side diffs, so I wanted it in the terminal. Many unified diff renderers colorize, fewer do side-by-side, and even fewer do character-level diffing. In fact, I found only 2: icdiff and ydiff.

I forget why I preferred ydiff, but I used it for a while before deciding to slim it down and improve it. The result is my ydiff fork, which renders 2x faster and starts up 3x faster (as a Cythonized executable). I also made the colorization better.

To install (it’s shockingly easy), see here. Screenshots.

I also posted this to reddit, there’s some good discussion there. In particular, its advantages over GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF.