wdiff

What it is

Stock wdiff is a thin front-end that runs diff and re-formats the line-level output into word-level markers: deleted words get [-like this-], inserted words get {+like this+}. Compared to stock diff, you see exactly which words changed, not just which lines.

$ printf 'the quick brown fox\n' > a.txt
$ printf 'the slow brown fox\n' > b.txt
$ wdiff a.txt b.txt
the [-quick-] {+slow+} brown fox

Most useful when two texts differ by a few words but paragraphs have been refilled — exactly the case where diff -u shows a whole paragraph as changed.

Install (one line)

The fastest path uses x-cmd:

x eget ljh-sh/wdiff

This installs wdiff, diff, and the man pages to ~/.local/bin/ and ~/.local/share/man/man1/. See install for the manual walkthrough or the binary-only install.

Platform matrix

Every release builds 5 targets via GitHub Actions on native runners. Linux uses musl-static (Alpine toolchain) so the binary runs on Alpine, Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedora, Arch — every Linux distro — with zero system-library dependencies. There is intentionally no separate glibc/dynamic Linux variant.

aarch64-windows and additional targets are deferred. Restoring aarch64-windows would require either LLVM clang with -target aarch64-w64-windows-msvc, or building mingw-w64-aarch64 from source.

Quick check after install

$ wdiff --version | head -1
wdiff (GNU wdiff) 1.2.2

$ diff --version | head -1
diff (GNU diffutils) 3.10

$ printf 'the quick brown fox\n' > /tmp/a.txt
$ printf 'the slow brown fox\n' > /tmp/b.txt
$ wdiff /tmp/a.txt /tmp/b.txt
the [-quick-] {+slow+} brown fox

Security

See security for the source-level audit. Two HIGH findings (both popen() + $PATH lookup) are mitigated in the ljh-sh dist by absolute-pathing DIFF_PROGRAM to the bundled diff binary, so the runtime binary never traverses $PATH to find diff.