As the years go by, I find myself increasingly in the minority of those who still prefer the unified diff view. My favourite tool for diffing has always been “

As the years go by, I find myself increasingly in the minority of those who still prefer the unified diff view. My favourite tool for diffing has always been “diff -u”. I sometimes even use “diff -U10000” when I want to see the entire file as context. Thankfully, GitHub still supports unified diff view, so I don’t feel left out while reviewing GitHub pull requests. In fact, once upon a time, when there was no GitHub or GitLab and there were no “pull requests”, open source developers used to email each other .diff files (often also named .patch files) which were nothing but unified diff files. A reviewer would apply the patch on their copy of source code with something like “patch -p0 < new.diff” and test it locally on their system. That was the CI of that era.