You're using the word 'diff' for 2 different things: - an efficient way to store 2 very similar files - the minimal set of changes made by a programmer to a f

You're using the word 'diff' for 2 different things: - an efficient way to store 2 very similar files - the minimal set of changes made by a programmer to a file. Subversion uses the same diff algorithm for these 2 functions, which is why people conflate them. But git uses different algorithms. The first one (which it calls deltas) are optimized for speed and compression ratio. The second set of algorithms (you can choose from a few, some of which are better at identifying rearrangements of large blocks of text) are optimized for merging 2 programmer's changes without conflicts.