DiffViz: A Diff Algorithm Independent Visualization Tool for Edit Scripts

Abstract

A number of approaches and tools exist that extract and visualize the changes between two versions of a file and thereby help developers to understand them. DiffViz is an interactive visualization tool that visualizes the changes independent from the differencing algorithm. It supports, but is not limited to, a granularity on the level of abstract syntax trees. Furthermore, it provides several new features, such as node matching and the mini-map, to navigate and analyze the changes. A demo of the installation and example usage of the tool is available here: https://youtu.be/RF93ey9GYoc