Command/App of the Week: vimdiff

Vimdiff starts Vim on two (or three or four) files. Each file gets its own window. The differences between the files are highlighted. This is a nice way to inspect changes and
to move changes from one version to another version of the same file.

See vim(1) for details about Vim itself.

When started as gvimdiff the GUI will be started, if available.

In each window the ’diff’ option will be set, which causes the differences to be highlighted. The ’wrap’ and ’scrollbind’ options are set to make the text look good. The ’foldmethod’ option is set to “diff”, which puts ranges of lines without changes in a fold. ’foldcolumn’ is set to two to make it easy to spot the folds and open or close them.

Vimdiff is part of the vim package. Vim may not be installed by default on some distributions.

Ubuntu/Raspbian:

 sudo apt-get install vim

CentOS:

 sudo yum install vim