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Is it possible to get use svn in combination with vim to get a series of tab pages which contain a diff of each file? It would be a much better alternative to svn diff | view -, but instead of a linear list of diffs it would use vimdiff.

In the past, I have found a way to do this and get svn diff to open multiple vims for each file edited, but being able to go back and review old files would be very useful. Therefore, given a set of tuples of files S, I need a vim shell command which will open each file in the first position of the tuples of S in a different tab page and diff it with the corresponding file in the second position of the tuples in S.

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  • I've written scripts that do pretty much what you ask, but for git instead of svn. They actually only call out to git in one place, so I suspect that modifying to work with svn would be pretty easy. The scripts are documented here: xenomachina.com/2012/02/multi-diff-with-vim-andor-git.html Commented Feb 11, 2012 at 5:32

2 Answers 2

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You can specify the diff command you want to use in Subversion via the --diff-cmd command line switch, or by specifying it in the Subversion configuration (which is $HOME/.subversion/config for the Unix command line client).

The main thing is to understand what parameters are passed to your SVN diff command:

  • 4th to Last Parameter - Program Title on the left side
  • 3rd to Last Parameter - Program Title on the right side
  • 2nd to Last Parameter - Temporary file on the left side
  • Last Parameter - Temporary file on the right side

The first parameters passed are the switches to the Subversion diff command. For example:

  • -u
  • -L

You can use this information to create a script to view the files in VIM. Here's a simple Perl one:

#! /usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $diff = "/usr/bin/vimdiff";

my $num_of_params = $#ARGV;

my $file1 = $ARGV[$num_of_params - 1];
my $file2 = $ARGV[$num_of_params];

my $title1 = $ARGV[$num_of_params - 4];
my $title2 = $ARGV[$num_of_params - 3];

my $title = "$title1 - $title2";
$title =~ s/\t/    /g;
$title =~ s/ /\\ /g;

system qq($diff -c "set titlestring=$title" "$file1" "$file2");

You must make sure that your system command (like vimdiff) holds the command line. I tried to use mvim on my Mac, but the temporary files were deleted before the mvim command was executed.

Now, you can do this:

$ svn diff --diff-cmd mydiff -rPREV

And, if your script is in your PATH and is executable, it should work.

Thanks to ZyX

Here's the improved program taking in ZyX's suggestions. I had to make some changes. My diff command is actually mvim on my machine, and I need to pass in two parameters (-d to say it's a diff, and -f to say not to throw mvim into the background). This meant passing $DIFF as ZyX suggested would cause my system command to think that mvim -d -f is my command, and I get an error. To solve this, I store the command in an array. I've also made the array constant while I was at it.

Here's the program below. Change DIFF to point to your diff command (which is probably vimdiff, gvim -d -f, or vim -d. If you're on Windows, and the full path is under C:/Program Files/Vim, you can use C:/Progr~1/Vim to get rid of the space. Otherwise, you'll need to do:

use constant DIFF => ('C:/Program Files/Vim/VIM73/gvim', '-f', '-d')

since you won't be able to use qw. Can we say Thank you Microsoft for putting a space in the directory name where all commands are stored for no good reason? I knew you could. BTW, if the directory where your editor is located is in your PATH, you don't need to specify the full directory name.

#! /usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use constant DIFF => qw(mvim -d -f);

my $parameters = $#ARGV;
my $file1 = $ARGV[$parameters - 1];
my $file2 = $ARGV[$parameters];
my $title1 = $ARGV[$parameters - 4];
my $title2 = $ARGV[$parameters - 2];

$ENV{TITLE} = "$title1  -   $title2";

system DIFF, '-c', 'let &titlestring=$TITLE', $file1, $file2;
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8 Comments

Passing arguments from perl to vim this way is bad as they does not get proper quoting. I would write this as $ENV{"TITLE"}=$title; system vimdiff => '-c', 'let &titlestring=$TITLE', $file1, $file2;. Note that you also have two typos: $title1 =~ where 1 should be absent and qq(diff instead of qq(vimdiff.
@ZyX - Thanks for your comments. The typos crept in because I was trying to type in my script which was displayed on one system while typing it in on another where I was reading Stackoverflow. The script works, but I was never fond of how I quoted the title. Your method looks way better, and I'll give it a try. If it works, I'll redo my answer to incorporate it.
See modified script in my answer above.
This is not what I wanted. I know how to do this. I was asking for a vim command, so instead of opening a separate vimdiff for each file to be diffed, a single vim would open containing tab pages for each file. Tab pages is a key word. It would be the same as what diffuse -m does, essentially.
@solinent - The problem is that svn diff calls your diff command once for each file to be diffed. You'd have to write a diff command to collect the information that svn diff gives you, and then a wrapper around svn diff itself to combine all of the information from the various diff calls. Even worse, svn diff returns to you temp files that get deleted after each call to your diff program. You'll have to copy these temp files somewhere while you're diff is running. I guess once you've gotten all of this together, you could actually write a vimdiff script to set it up.
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This can be done with a couple of scripts, and making use of vim's "server" functionality. The scripts below could be improved a bit, for example it assumes that you want to do this in graphical Vim, and that you don't want the script to exit until you quit this Vim. Also, the diffs default to using a horizontal split due to using "diffsplit".

I do it with the following two scripts. Execute the bash script in the directory you want to run the diff in:

#!/bin/bash

export VIM_SERVERNAME="SVN-$RANDOM"

# Start up a vim, graphical, in the foreground, but backgrounded...
vim -g -f --servername "$VIM_SERVERNAME" &
# So we get can it's PID to wait on later
gvim_pid=$!

# Wait for the server to start up enough
sleep 0.5

# Use svn diff to get the right set of files to pass to vimdiff
svn diff --diff-cmd "vim_tab_diff_helper.py" >/dev/null

# Move to the start of the list; remove the first tab which will be the empty
# tab
vim --servername "$VIM_SERVERNAME" --remote-send ":tabfirst<Return>"
vim --servername "$VIM_SERVERNAME" --remote-send ":bd<Return>"

# Wait for the user to exit vim before returning
wait $gvim_pid

The helper script "vim_tab_diff_helper.py" is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os
import subprocess
import sys

def vim_send(command):
  global vim_server
  subprocess.call(['vim', '--servername', vim_server, '--remote-send',
    command + '<Return>'])

vim_server = os.environ['VIM_SERVERNAME']
svn_orig_file = sys.argv[ len(sys.argv) - 2 ]
modified_file = sys.argv[ len(sys.argv) - 1 ]

vim_send(":tabnew")
vim_send(":e " + svn_orig_file)
vim_send(":diffsplit " + modified_file)
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3 Comments

I'm marking this as the answer because it's almost there! It seems to be diffing the wrong two files at the moment on my machine. I don't have the time to fix it, but I will when I do have time.
To see what it's trying to diff, run something like "svn diff --diff-cmd=echo"; the last two arguments are what are being used in my scripts there.
FYI: sys.argv[len(sys.argv) - N] can be more concisely written as sys.argv[-N].

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