I find myself frequently needing to compare two text blocks together without creating a file for each first, and then wishing to run a diff between the two of them.
Is there a tool I can use and just copy and paste both into empty buffers and then receive a diff between the two of them?
Meld (Wikipedia article) allows this.
When you open a new diff tab (Ctrl+n), a popup asks you to select two (or three) files. You can simply hit OK here, without selecting something.
It opens empty buffers, just like in a text editor, which allows you to paste (or type) text. The diff happens on the fly (while you paste/type/edit the text).
When you close the diff tab, the tool asks if you want to save the files.
Screenshot from http://meldmerge.org/features.html:
File Comparison button, and then clicked the Blank comparison and than that did the trick.
Another option is diffuse: http://diffuse.sourceforge.net/index.html
It opens to two blank panes by default, and you can paste whatever you like into each side.
Not the prettiest necessarily, but you could could do it with process substitution and heredocs:
diff <(cat <<EOF1
First text
and more
EOF1) <(cat <<EOF2
Second text
and more
EOF2)
would produce the output:
1c1
< First text
---
> Second text
and you could put whatever you like in each block of text of course.
Another option would be to use vim as in the answers here
The process I'd like with that one would be to do the following within vim:
:diffthis to include that window in the diff:vnew to get another window split vertically so they are side-by-side:diffthispresto, you've got your highlighted diff
