Although I’m generally allergic to dependencies as a programmer, I occasionally stumble upon a package that 1) does a thing I really wouldn’t want to implement myself, and 2) is obviously well crafted and likely to be reliable and well maintained. Having great tools in your back pocket, waiting to be leveraged when needed, is a superpower.

So here’s one such tool: @pierre/diffs, available at diffs.com (what a domain name!), is a package for rendering really nice file diffs. And although it comes with a React component, it also has a vanilla JavaScript API as well which is most appreciated.

I used this package in a tool I’ve been building recently, and I was delighted at how simple it was to integrate, and how it respected the existing typography styles in my project.

In a different universe we might have primitives such as this baked into the web platform, but short of that it’s nice to know there’s a well-built tool for this that we can all use. Thanks, Pierre!