OmniDiff
Opensource, super fast, content aware Git difftool, in Rust
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I have been researching what the ultimate diff tool would look like, based on actual diffs in open source repositories.OmniDiff can diff: code (25 languages), config, images, PDFs, archives, cursors, fonts...It's fast. It can diff C++ files of tens of thousands of lines in under 100ms, on a 2023 ThinkPad T14s.It's open source. AGPLv3.It's based on real diffs. I looked at the 7400 repositories that are listed in Gentoo packages, sampled 2000 diffs and solved them manually to get a good understanding of what is needed, before putting together the diff pipelines for each content type. Incidentally, this also forms the basis of the CI pipeline, so the robustness of the codebase is quite high.I'm still developing it. It's v0.3.0 at this time. But I have been using it daily as my git difftool for months now, and it works well.AI Disclosure: Yes, I do use AI. No, I do not vibecode.
HN · launched Nov 1, 2026 · 319 upvotes (top 3%) · 0 views
Niche: code diff and technical document viewers · 26 launches, 0 in the last 7 days ▼ -100% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 26 launches in code diff and technical document viewers →
Could you build this?
Partial The UI and Git integration are buildable, and many format parsers exist as libraries (e.g., tree-sitter for code). However, the high-performance diff engine and format-aware diffing for images, PDFs, fonts and archives are hard to get right and fast.
What it would actually take: A real version would be a Rust diff engine using tree-sitter grammars for about 25 languages, a Git difftool integration, and format-specific decoders for images, PDFs, fonts and archives. The hard parts are the performance tuning (sub-100ms on large files) and semantically meaningful diffs for binary formats. This needs systems programming experience and careful profiling.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Delta, Difftastic, Diffsitter, diffstatic
Concerns raised: AUR package unavailable, install split across three methods, AGPL license limits adoption, AI-assisted code copyright uncertainty, performance and accuracy claims unverified
Feature requests: highlight whole changed lines, not just characters, Homebrew install for Linux, side-by-side diffs on wide terminals, diff-so-fancy style shading, official Arch package
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 354 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #19 of 355 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 367 days after the earliest competitor.
- CodeDiff · hn · 2026-09-29 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.67
- I rebuilt the only parts of my IDE I use, in Rust, over a weekend · hn · 2026-06-22 · 50 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Deff · hn · 2026-02-26 · 120 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- BlazeDiff v2 · hn · 2025-12-19 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Diffswarm · hn · 2026-01-06 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Glyd · github · 2026-09-19 · 164 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Diom · hn · 2026-05-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- omafil · github · 2026-09-12 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
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