I've had this idea too, and think about it everytime I'm on a PR with lots of whitespace/non-functional noise how nice it would be if source code wern't just text and I could be looking at a cleaner higher level diff instead.. I think you have to go higher than AST though, it should at least be language-aware

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gritzko 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

(Author) In my current codebase, I preserve the whitespace nodes. Whitespace changes would not affect the other nodes though. My first attempt to recover whitespace algorithmically not exactly failed, but more like I was unable to verify it is OK enough. We clang-format or go fmt the entire thing anyway, and whitespace changes are mostly noise, but I did not find 100% sure approach yet.

	▲	gfody 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think about eg the "using" section at the top of a .cs file where order doesn't matter and it's common for folks to use the "Remove and Sort Usings" feature in VS.. if that were modeled as a set then diffs would consist only of added/removed items and a re-ordering wouldn't even be representable. And then every other manner of refactor that noises up a PR: renaming stuff, moving code around, etc. in my fantasies some perfect high-level model would separate everything that matters from everything that doesn't and when viewing PRs or change history we could tick "ignore superficial changes" to cut thru all the noise when looking for something specific ..to my mind such a thing could only be language-specific and the model for C# is probably something similar to Roslyn's interior (it keeps "trivia" nodes separate but still models the using section as a list for some reason) and having it all in a queryable database would be glorious for change analysis

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zelphirkalt 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Some languages are unfortunately whitespace sensitive, so a generic VCS cannot discard whitespace at all. But maybe the diffing tools themselves could be made language aware and hide not meaningful changes.

	▲	em-bee 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		hiding not meaningful changes is not enough. when a block in python changes the indentation, i want to see that the block is otherwise unchanged. so indentation changes simply need to be marked differently. if a tool can to that then it will also work with code where indentation is optional, allowing me to cleanly indent code without messing up the diff. i saw a diff tool that marked only the characters that changed. that would work here.

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procaryote 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can build a mergetool (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-mergetool)