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I'm using the graphical differ. On some lines only a character has changed (for example the last digit in a year in the copyright), or some additional whitespace characters have been added. The diff viewer shows the entire line as different, highlighting both the old and new line in blue. It would be nice if it would highlight only the parts where they differ. Then I can immediately spot the difference. Note that this does not mean you have to do sub-line diffing; keep your current line oriented diff algorithms. All you have to do is change the code which creates the highlighting on the lines: start from the beginning of both strings and find the first index where the two differ. Then start from the end of both strings and find the first index where they differ. Now highlight this range in each view (the first index will be the same, the last index may be different if the two line lengths are different).
Accidentally filed with category graphics - should be code.
Yes, this would be a really good improvement. It is already planned for 4.0 release in issue #26182, though I'm not sure there will be enough time to implement it, because projects and performance have higher priority. BTW: there is already API for it (see org.netbeans.api.diff.Difference and org.netbeans.api.diff.Difference.Part in http://www.netbeans.org/download/dev/javadoc/DiffAPIs/index.html). However it's not yet supported by the diff engines and visualizers. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 26182 ***
Verified as duplicate.