Question

I am starting to use Subversion on Linux. svn diff gives a very cryptic view—very, very unfriendly to eyes. How do I interpret its output? And more importantly, is there a way to view the difference in vimdiff kind of neat style, where both files will open side by side?

Answer 1

Found it at:
http://blog.tplus1.com/index.php/2007/08/29/how-to-use-vimdiff-as-the-subversion-diff-tool/

This blog post takes the script directly from the SVN book external diff tools example:

diffwrap.sh

#!/bin/sh

# Configure your favorite diff program here.
DIFF="/usr/local/bin/vimdiff"

# Subversion provides the paths we need as the sixth and seventh 
# parameters.
LEFT=${6}
RIGHT=${7}

# Call the diff command (change the following line to make sense for
# your merge program).
$DIFF $LEFT $RIGHT

# Return an errorcode of 0 if no differences were detected, 1 if some were.
# Any other errorcode will be treated as fatal.

Note: This assumes that your vimdiff is in /usr/local/bin, for me, in Fedora, it was in /usr/bin. If you can’t find it run:

$ whereis vimdiff

Then in ~/.subversion/config:

[helpers]
...
diff-cmd = /home/<username>/bin/diffwrap.sh