> There is the little-known compare-windows command, which ... has a > major drawback of not displaying any “report” ... sometimes I’d like > to have something more “tangible” to look at
I hacked together a solution to that:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/56350845/324105
It simply runs compare-windows repeatedly until it runs out of
differences, and it keeps all of the highlighting along the way, so
you end up with a complete highlighted view of the differences.
This works really nicely for simple cases, but it’s very slow for
comparing buffers with large numbers of differences. I’m convinced
that an efficient diff-based solution could be derived from other code
already in Emacs; but failing that you may find the above command to
be quite useful.
– Anonymous 2019-11-12 02:39 UTC
Why not use `ediff-buffers`? That way you can avoid the temp files, just create a pair of temp buffers.
– Joost 2019-11-13 16:04 UTC
Interestingly, at least on my system, if `select-enable-primary` is set to t, this command will fail when used as described because `kill-ring-save` AND the simple act of selection both save to the kill ring, so whenever `kill-ring-save` is run you get duplicate entries in the kill-ring.
I’m not sure how to deal with this, but disabling `select-enable-primary` works for me.
– Mat tPrice 2019-11-20 17:56 UTC