diff: Fix inline word diff to treat non-alpha multibyte chars as non-word #17050
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…word Previously inline word diff simply used Vim's definition of keyword to determine what is a word, which leads to multi-byte character classes such as emojis and CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters all classifying as word characters, leading to entire sentences being grouped as a single word which does not provide meaningful information in a diff highlight. Fix this by treating all non-alphanumeric characters (with class number above 2) as non-word characters, as there is usually no benefit in using word diff on them. These include CJK characters, emojis, and also subscript/superscript numbers. Meanwhile, multi-byte characters like Cyrillic and Greek letters will still continue to considered as words. Note that this is slightly inconsistent with how words are defined elsewhere, as Vim usually considers any character with class >=2 to be a "word". Related: vim#16881 (diff inline highlight)
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FWIW I checked other diff programs that do word diff and a lot of them don't solve this correctly. E.g. the default Apple's FileMerge does solve this by finding proper word boundaries in CJK languages by doing locale-specific processing (generally macOS text fields do proper segmenting and understands CJK word boundaries), but I don't really think we need to solve that here. If we do want to solve this issue by having word motions be smarter we could look at how web browsers implement the |
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zeertzjq
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Problem: inline word diff treats multibyte chars as word char
(after 9.1.1243)
Solution: treat all non-alphanumeric characters as non-word characters
(Yee Cheng Chin)
Previously inline word diff simply used Vim's definition of keyword to
determine what is a word, which leads to multi-byte character classes
such as emojis and CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters all
classifying as word characters, leading to entire sentences being
grouped as a single word which does not provide meaningful information
in a diff highlight.
Fix this by treating all non-alphanumeric characters (with class number
above 2) as non-word characters, as there is usually no benefit in using
word diff on them. These include CJK characters, emojis, and also
subscript/superscript numbers. Meanwhile, multi-byte characters like
Cyrillic and Greek letters will still continue to considered as words.
Note that this is slightly inconsistent with how words are defined
elsewhere, as Vim usually considers any character with class >=2 to be
a "word".
related: vim/vim#16881 (diff inline highlight)
closes: vim/vim#17050
vim/vim@9aa120f
Co-authored-by: Yee Cheng Chin <[email protected]>
zeertzjq
added a commit
to neovim/neovim
that referenced
this pull request
Apr 5, 2025
…har (#33323) Problem: inline word diff treats multibyte chars as word char (after 9.1.1243) Solution: treat all non-alphanumeric characters as non-word characters (Yee Cheng Chin) Previously inline word diff simply used Vim's definition of keyword to determine what is a word, which leads to multi-byte character classes such as emojis and CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters all classifying as word characters, leading to entire sentences being grouped as a single word which does not provide meaningful information in a diff highlight. Fix this by treating all non-alphanumeric characters (with class number above 2) as non-word characters, as there is usually no benefit in using word diff on them. These include CJK characters, emojis, and also subscript/superscript numbers. Meanwhile, multi-byte characters like Cyrillic and Greek letters will still continue to considered as words. Note that this is slightly inconsistent with how words are defined elsewhere, as Vim usually considers any character with class >=2 to be a "word". related: vim/vim#16881 (diff inline highlight) closes: vim/vim#17050 vim/vim@9aa120f Co-authored-by: Yee Cheng Chin <[email protected]>
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Previously inline word diff simply used Vim's definition of keyword to determine what is a word, which leads to multi-byte character classes such as emojis and CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) characters all classifying as word characters, leading to entire sentences being grouped as a single word which does not provide meaningful information in a diff highlight (since those characters are not necessarily separated by space).
Fix this by treating all non-alphanumeric characters (with class number above 2) as non-word characters, as there is usually no benefit in using word diff on them. These include CJK characters, emojis, and also subscript/superscript numbers. Meanwhile, multi-byte characters like Cyrillic and Greek letters will still continue to considered as words.
Note that this is slightly inconsistent with how words are defined elsewhere, as Vim usually considers any character with class >=2 to be a "word".
Related: #16881 (diff inline highlight)