Domos Digital

Practical guides / Text & encoding

Compare changes by line, word and whitespace

A useful diff makes changes legible before you decide what to keep. Compare two versions by line for structural edits or by word for prose-level changes, without interpreting either side as HTML.

How to use the workspace

  1. Paste the original version into Before and the revised version into After.
  2. Select line or word mode. Choose whether whitespace differences matter.
  3. Compare, inspect added and removed sections, and explicitly copy or download the unified diff if needed.

A concrete starting point

Before: deploy edge --replicas 2
After:  deploy edge --replicas 3
Word mode highlights the changed argument.

The original inputs stay side by side on wide screens and stack on smaller screens.

Read the result carefully

Added and removed content has textual markers as well as color. Statistics describe the selected comparison units. Unified context lines control the surrounding content in exported changes, not an automatic merge.

Common mistakes to avoid

  • Ignoring whitespace may conceal important changes in whitespace-sensitive languages.
  • A diff is not a merge or syntax validator.
  • HTML-like input is shown literally. It is never rendered as a page or executable markup.

Limits & privacy

512 KiB per side, bounded diff parts and a 2-second worker deadline. Large or expensive comparisons fail visibly instead of freezing the workspace.

Local: processed in this browser

Inputs stay in browser memory. Saving or downloading is an explicit action; there is no automatic input history.

Read the full privacy boundaries
Open Text Diff →