Agreed, I don't think the value of a semantic diff would be in hiding changes. Instead, the value should be in generating more useful diffs. Normal diff often

Agreed, I don't think the value of a semantic diff would be in hiding changes. Instead, the value should be in generating more useful diffs. Normal diff often gets "confused" compared to how you'd logically identify the code. For example, if you extract a piece of a larger function as a smaller function, instead of showing that a piece of code was moved, it will show that you changed a header, deleted some lines, added others below, etc. A semantic diff should be able to refine these diffs in a better way, but shouldn't hide them. Even for the whitespace changes, I'd like it to show the diff, but the overlay to explain that only whitespace is different, so I know I don't need to look at it carefully.