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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/32235
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I wrote a play that I performed this summer, and have done significant re-writes for an upcoming second performance run. In order to help me relearn my lines, I think it would be useful to see _which_ were changed/removed/added all together, rather than just reading through the new version and hoping for it to stick.

I wrote my play in markdown (using iaWriter). and I have both versions saved separately.

I'm also a programmer, and am used to version control, so I tried making a git repository where I started with a txt file that had the original version, and then pasted the new version on top of it and committed the changes. I was hoping the diff would be more useful than it was... but it's at least something! (I was hoping for instance to see 95% identical lines identified as the same line, but often they were not.. because multiple lines show up between them.

So I'm wondering if there may be a better way to get a useful diff of 2 plain text files that would be improved in terms of identifying more word-based rather than line-based differences.

And if so (even just for git diffs) if there would be a way to output this in a way that can be saved into useful reading formats.

Original score: 3