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Accepted
jarno
Asked: 2020-05-07 08:24:28 +0800 CST

How to replace Diffuse?

  • 772

Why was Diffuse left out of Universe repository of Ubuntu 20.04? What to use instead (if you don't want to use plain diff but a graphical software)?

software-recommendation 20.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It is possible to install from manually downloaded packages from 18.04 LTS:

    cd ~/Downloads
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/pygtk/python-gtk2_2.24.0-5.1ubuntu2_amd64.deb
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/d/diffuse/diffuse_0.4.8-3_all.deb
sudo apt-get install ./diffuse_0.4.8-3_all.deb ./python-gtk2_2.24.0-5.1ubuntu2_amd64.deb

    Other good alternatives are Meld (meld package) or KDiff3 (kdiff3 package).

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  2. The package was dropped from Debian back in 2019, thence from Ubuntu also.

    • Looks like it was abandoned upstream. Their mailing list has no responses from the developers for several years.
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  3. As of summer 2020, the updated fork of diffuse at https://github.com/MightyCreak/diffuse is the best way to go. It is very usable directly from source on Ubuntu 20.04. The main prerequisites are python3 and python3-gi, both of which are new enough on Ubuntu 20.04. Install python3 and python3-gi with

    sudo apt install python3-gi

    On non-desktop machines, you may need to install also the following packages that are otherwise typically installed already:

    sudo apt install gobject-introspection gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gnome-icon-theme python3-gi-cairo

    Then clone the diffuse fork from github to a folder of your liking. To run diffuse, it's sufficient to call the python script src/usr/bin/diffuse. It may be even more convenient to add the bin-folder to your PATH:

    export PATH="${HOME}/your/path/to/diffuse/src/usr/bin:${PATH}"

    The path setting can also be placed in your shells startup scripts (i.e. .bashrc or similar) to have diffuse always available.

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