Glossary - Difftastic Manual
Description: The manual for difftastic, the structural diff tool

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# Glossary

Atom: An atom is an item in difftastic’s syntax tree structure that has no children. It represents things like literals, variable names, and comments. See also ‘list’.

Delimiter: A paired piece of syntax. A list has an open delimiter and a close delimiter, such as `[` and `]`. Delimiters may not be punctuation (e.g. `begin` and `end`) and may be empty strings (e.g. infix syntax converted to difftastic’s syntax tree).

Hunk: A group of lines displayed together in the diff output. Increasing the number of context lines increases the size of the hunk.

LHS: Left-hand side. Difftastic compares two items, and LHS refers to the first item. See also ‘RHS’.

Line-oriented: A traditional diff that compares which lines have been added or removed, unlike difftastic. For example, GNU diff or the diffs displayed on GitHub.

List: A list is an item in difftastic’s syntax tree structure that has an open delimiter, children, and a close delimiter. It represents things like expressions and function definitions. See also ‘atom’.

Novel: An addition or a removal. Syntax is novel if it occurs in only one of the two items being compared.

RHS: Right-hand side. Difftastic compares two items, and RHS refers to the second item. See also ‘LHS’.

Root: A syntax tree without a parent node. Roots represent top-level definitions in the file being diffed.

Slider: A diffing situation where there are multiple minimal diffs possible, due to adjacent content. It is possible to ‘slide’ to produce better results in this situation. See the discussion in Tricky Cases.

Syntax node: An item in difftastic’s syntax tree structure. Either an atom or a list.

Token: A small piece of syntax tracked by difftastic (e.g. `$x`, `function` or `]`), for highlighting and aligned display. This is either an atom or a non-empty delimiter.