OrgDiff

As we're all aware, one of the lovely things about working in plaintext is that you can run version control over your documents. git diff does a perfectly passable job at showing you how your Org files has changed, but what about when you want something richer? Well latexdiff is brilliant for LaTeX files, and you can export Org to LaTeX! However, it's a bit of a hassle, you need to

1. Check out an old revision of your repository
2. Export your Org file to LaTeX
3. Fast-forward to the newer version
4. Do another Org export to LaTeX
5. Run latexdiff on the two .tex files
6. Compile to a PDF, and view it

Gah! This is sounding like a bit of a pain. That's where OrgDiff comes in. It automates all of the above, and provides a few other quality of life improvements, namely:

• Commit selection via the venerable Magit
• Parallel exporting of the two Org files to TeX
• Descriptive forms of the main latexdiff options, accessible via a Transient interface
• Automatic TeX compiler-upgrading. I.e., if one document needs LuaLaTeX and the other needs XeLaTeX, then we need to use LuaLaTeX to compile the latexdiff result

Along with that we provide some more basic options, like comparing any two Org files without git, just creating the .tex diff, or running ediff on the Org files.

Do note that while this seems to work, it's quite early on in development, and it shows in the code (lack of documentation, etc.). It seems perfectly usable though 🙂.