diffsitter

diffsitter

Disclaimer

diffsitter is very much a work in progress and nowhere close to production ready (yet). Contributions are always welcome!

Summary

diffsitter creates semantically meaningful diffs that ignore formatting differences like spacing. It does so by computing a diff on the AST (abstract syntax tree) of a file rather than computing the diff on the text contents of the file.

diffsitter uses the parsers from the tree-sitter project to parse source code. As such, the languages supported by this tool are restricted to the languages supported by tree-sitter.

diffsitter supports the following languages:

• Bash
• C#
• C++
• CSS
• Go
• Java
• OCaml
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• Rust
• Typescript/TSX
• HCL

Examples

Take the following files:

a.rs

fn main() {
    let x = 1;
}

fn add_one {
}

b.rs

fn

main

()

{
}

fn addition() {
}

fn add_two() {
}

The standard output from diff will get you:

1,2c1,12
< fn main() {
<     let x = 1;
---
> fn
>
>
>
> main
>
> ()
>
> {
> }
>
> fn addition() {
5c15
< fn add_one {
---
> fn add_two() {

You can see that it picks up the formatting differences for the main function, even though they aren't semantically different.

Check out the output from diffsitter:

test_data/short/rust/a.rs -> test_data/short/rust/b.rs
======================================================

9:
--
+ }

11:
---
+ fn addition() {

1:
--
-     let x = 1;

14:
---
+ fn add_two() {

4:
--
- fn add_one {

Note: the numbers correspond to line numbers from the original files.

You can also filter which tree sitter nodes are considered in the diff through the config file.

Since it uses the AST to calculate the difference, it knows that the formatting differences in main between the two files isn't a meaningful difference, so it doesn't show up in the diff.

diffsitter has some nice (terminal aware) formatting too:

It also has extensive logging if you want to debug or see timing information:

Node filtering

You can filter the nodes that are considered in the diff by setting include_nodes or exclude_nodes in the config file. exclude_nodes always takes precedence over include_nodes, and the type of a node is the kind of a tree-sitter node. The kind directly corresponds to whatever is reported by the tree-sitter API, so this example may occasionally go out of date.

This feature currently only applies to leaf nodes, but we could exclude nodes recursively if there's demand for it.

"input-processing": {
    // You can exclude different tree sitter node types - this rule takes precedence over `include_kinds`.
    "exclude_kinds": ["string_content"],
    // You can specifically allow only certain tree sitter node types
    "include_kinds": ["method_definition"],
}

Installation

Published binaries

This project uses Github actions to build and publish binaries for each tagged release. You can download binaries from there if your platform is listed. We publish nightly releases as well as tagged stable releases.

Cargo

You can build from source with cargo using the following command:

cargo install diffsitter --bin diffsitter

If you want to generate completion files and other assets you can install the diffsitter_completions binary with the following command:

cargo install diffsitter --bin diffsitter_completions

Homebrew

You can use my tap to install diffsitter:

brew tap afnanenayet/tap
brew install diffsitter
# brew install afnanenayet/tap/diffsitter

Arch Linux (AUR)

@samhh has packaged diffsitter for arch on the AUR. Use your favorite AUR helper to install diffsitter-bin.

Alpine Linux

Install package diffsitter from the Alpine Linux repositories (on v3.16+ or Edge):

apk add diffsitter

Tree-sitter grammars are packaged separately (search for tree-sitter-*). You can install individual packages you need or the virtual package tree-sitter-grammars to install all of them.

Building with Docker

We also provide a Docker image that builds diffsitter using the standard Rust base image. It separates the compilation stage from the run stage, so you can build it and run with the following command (assuming you have Docker installed on your system):

docker build -t diffsitter .
docker run -it --rm --name diffsitter-interactive diffsitter

Usage

For detailed help you can run diffsitter --help (diffsitter -h provides brief help messages).

You can configure file associations and formatting options for diffsitter using a config file. If a config is not supplied, the app will use the default config, which you can see with diffsitter dump-default-config. It will look for a config at ${XDG_HOME:-$HOME}/.config/diffsitter/config.json5 on macOS and Linux, and the standard directory for Windows. You can also refer to the sample config.

You can override the default config path by using the --config flag or set the DIFFSITTER_CONFIG environment variable.

Note: the tests for this crate check to make sure the provided sample config is a valid config.

Git integration

To see the changes to the current git repo in diffsitter, you can add the following to your repo's .git/config and run git difftool.

[diff]
        tool = diffsitter

[difftool]
        prompt = false

[difftool "diffsitter"]
        cmd = diffsitter "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

Shell Completion

You can generate shell completion scripts using the binary using the gen-completion subcommand. This will print the shell completion script for a given shell to STDOUT.

You should use the help text for the most up to date usage information, but general usage would look like this:

diffsitter gen-completion bash > completion.bash

We currently support the following shells (via clap_complete):

• Bash
• Zsh
• Fish
• Elvish
• Powershell

Dependencies

diffsitter is usually compiled as a static binary, so the tree-sitter grammars/libraries are baked into the binary as static libraries. There is an option to build with support for dynamic libraries which will look for shared library files in the user's default library path. This will search for library files of the form libtree-sitter-{lang}.{ext}, where lang is the language that the user is trying to diff and ext is the platform-specific extension for shared library files (.so, .dylib, etc). The user can override the dynamic library file for each language in the config as such:

{
    "grammar": {
        // You can specify the dynamic library names for each language
        "dylib-overrides": {
            // with a filename
            "rust": "libtree-sitter-rust.so",
            // with an absolute path
            "c": "/usr/lib/libtree-sitter-c.so",
            // with a relative path
            "cpp": "../libtree-sitter-c.so",
        },
    }
}

The above excerpt was taken from the sample config.

MCP Server (AI Code Navigation)

diffsitter includes an MCP server that exposes tree-sitter AST navigation as tools for AI coding assistants. This gives tools like Claude Code structural understanding of your code — jumping to definitions by name, listing symbols, inspecting scopes, and running tree-sitter queries — across all 14+ supported languages.

Tools

Tool Description parse_file Parse a file and return its top-level AST structure list_symbols List all functions, classes, structs, traits, enums, constants get_definition Get the full source text of a symbol by name get_children_of Get methods/fields inside a class, impl block, or module get_node_at_position Get the deepest AST node at a line/column get_scope Get the enclosing scope at a position with full parent chain navigate Move through the AST: parent, first_child, next_sibling, prev_sibling query Run a raw tree-sitter S-expression query with captures

Setup

Build the MCP server binary:

cargo build --release --features mcp-server --bin tree-sitter-mcp

Or install from crates.io:

cargo install diffsitter --features mcp-server --bin tree-sitter-mcp

Claude Code

Register the server with Claude Code:

# Register the binary as an MCP server
claude mcp add tree-sitter-mcp -- /path/to/tree-sitter-mcp

# Or use the bundled plugin for development (loads for one session)
claude --plugin-dir ./plugins/tree-sitter-mcp

Once registered, Claude Code can use the tools automatically. For example, asking "what functions are defined in src/diff.rs?" will use list_symbols instead of reading the entire file.

Other MCP clients

The server communicates over stdio using JSON-RPC. Any MCP-compatible client can use it by launching the binary as a subprocess:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tree-sitter-mcp": {
      "command": "/path/to/tree-sitter-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Example queries

The MCP server understands language grammar, not just text. Where grep finds string patterns, tree-sitter-mcp finds syntactic patterns — it knows the difference between a function called test and a #[test] attribute.

Symbol discovery

# "What's defined in this file?"
list_symbols  →  file_path: "src/diff.rs"

# "What methods does the Renderer trait define?"
get_children_of  →  file_path: "src/render/mod.rs", symbol_name: "Renderer"

# "Show me the signature of generate_ast_vector_data without reading the whole file"
get_definition  →  file_path: "src/lib.rs", symbol_name: "generate_ast_vector_data"

Scope & context

# "What function contains line 145 of src/diff.rs? Show me the full parent chain."
get_scope  →  file_path: "src/diff.rs", line: 145, column: 0

# "What's the AST node at this position? Navigate to its parent, then next sibling."
get_node_at_position  →  file_path: "src/lib.rs", line: 50, column: 10
navigate  →  file_path: "src/lib.rs", line: 50, column: 10, direction: "parent"

Tree-sitter queries (the real power)

The query tool accepts tree-sitter S-expression patterns for structural code search:

…

Questions, Bugs, and Support

If you notice any bugs, have any issues, want to see a new feature, or just have a question, feel free to open an issue or create a discussion post.

If you file an issue, it would be preferable that you include a minimal example and/or post the log output of diffsitter (which you can do by adding the -d/--debug flag).

Development

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (MSRV 1.85.1, edition 2024) — install via rustup
• C99+ compiler and C++14+ compiler — required to compile tree-sitter grammars (Apple Clang, GCC, or LLVM all work)
• Git submodules initialized — the build compiles tree-sitter grammars from vendored sources in grammars/

# Clone with submodules
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter.git

# Or initialize submodules in an existing checkout
git submodule update --init --recursive

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