If an environment diff looks like json, use a json differ like jd

[blaggacao]

Sometimes a environment diff is actual plain json, diffed on one big single row.
As a result an entire screen is coloured red/green without really helpful semantics.
Even the --character-oriented is not really of great help at times (when the diff is a little bigger).

It might be possible to use something like https://github.com/josephburnett/jd to make the result more intelligible.

Since these tools are no haskell, a good way would be to optionally write files with old/new environments to disk, it then becomes trivial to do the semantic diffing by hand.

[blaggacao]

I was able to copy chunks manually together from the output, but that's rather brittle.

[Gabriella439]

Yeah, we run into this same issue at work, too where the diff fares poorly on large JSON files. The tool can probably auto-detect JSON and use a more intelligent diff for that case

[blaggacao]

A colleague just hinted me at https://github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff -- which I happily forward really just for general knowledge & inspiration in the context of this issue.