Use vimdiff to display subversion diffs

November 27, 2007 in programming | 3 comments

I prefer using vimdiff or gvimdiff to view differences between files. When researching ways to allow using vimdiff to view subversion differences, I came across this article.

The bottom line is that subversion passes the two relevant arguments as the 6th and 7th arguments, so the following shell script wrapper does the trick:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/gvimdiff ${6} ${7}

Save the script as gvimdiff_wrapper.sh, make it executable and accessible on your path. Then modify $HOME/.subversion/config to have the following line:

diff-cmd = gvimdiff_wrapper.sh

That will allow you to use gvimdiff to display the diff generated by svn diff my_file.txt

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  1. Dean’s avatar

    Dean on October 23, 2008 at 2:44 pm

    Great tip! Thanks.

    This works perfectly when doing a straight svn diff like this:
    svn diff file1.php

    But when I want to compare two arbitrary revisions in the svn repository like this:
    svn diff -r 65:24 file1.php

    it doesn’t work. gvimdiff opens with two empty files named tmp and tmp.2

    Any idea on how to make it work in this situation?

  2. Brian Adkins’s avatar

    Brian Adkins on October 31, 2008 at 2:30 pm

    Sorry, I don’t have a good solution off hand. I actually switched to Emacs a while ago and it handles anything I’ve thrown at it.

  3. dig’s avatar

    dig on January 8, 2009 at 10:51 am

    gvimdiff –nofork might help there Dean