A real-time CLI tool for watching file changes and visualizing diffs in your terminal.

• Real-time file watching with platform-native notifications
• Live diff visualization with colored output
• Recursive subdirectory watching
• Smart file filtering (ignores shell history, lock files, temp files)
• Event coalescing to handle rapid file changes
• 1MB file size limit for graceful handling of large files
• Beautiful TUI built with Bubbletea
• Binary file detection
• Automatic permission error handling

brew install deemkeen/tap/diffwatch

go install github.com/deemkeen/diffwatch/cmd/diffwatch@latest

Download the pre-built binary for your platform from the latest release.

git clone https://github.com/deemkeen/diffwatch.git
cd diffwatch
go build -o bin/diffwatch ./cmd/diffwatch

Watch the current directory:

diffwatch

Watch a specific directory:

diffwatch -p /path/to/directory
# or
diffwatch -path /path/to/directory

Watch all subdirectories recursively:

diffwatch -p /path/to/directory -r
# or
diffwatch -path /path/to/directory -recursive

• -p, -path - Path to watch for changes (default: current directory)
• -r, -recursive - Watch all subdirectories recursively (default: false)
• -h - Show help

• q or Ctrl+C - Quit the application

File Change → fsnotify → Debouncer → State Manager → Diff Engine → TUI

1. File Watcher - Monitors files using platform-native APIs (inotify, FSEvents, etc.)
2. Event Coalescing - Batches rapid changes within a 200ms window to prevent TUI flicker
3. File Filtering - Automatically ignores noisy files (shell history, lock files, temp files)
4. State Manager - Tracks file contents for comparison
5. Diff Engine - Computes unified diffs between versions
6. TUI Renderer - Displays colorized diffs in real-time with file status

DiffWatch automatically ignores common noisy files:

• Shell history files (.zsh_history, .bash_history, etc.)
• Lock files (*.lock, *.LOCK)
• Vim/Emacs temporary files (.*.swp, #*#, *~)
• Common dotfiles (.lesshst, .viminfo, .recently-used)
• Build directories (.git, node_modules, .cache, etc.)

MIT