I have two quite large notebooks with minimal differences. To compare them, I currently put them side by side and compare with my eyes, which feels quite inefficient. What are better ways to do this?
I have done some searching but only found questions from 8/9 years ago, they didn't work for me. In Mathmatica 12 I could not find a function like "Notebookdiff" and I also do not use Wolfram Workbench.
If you want to compare the input lines in 2 notebooks, go to File/Save As and save the notebooks as "wolfram language script". The .wls is very clean and easy to compare with any line-by-line text compare tool.
At least in version 14.0 File/Save as "text" doesn't differentiate input and output, and contains all output from when the notebook last ran. It is very noisy.
Each section of inputs in the .wls file from a notebook begins with
(* ::Input:: *)
--- various input lines ---
(**)
It often ends before the (**) but sometimes the input lines are after the (* *)
There are sections for explicitly printed lines that begin with (* ::Print:: *)
Git diff works really well. Any command-line tool you know will work.
.nb-Files in a text editor might be quite difficult. One possibility would be to export the two notebooks as.txtwhich should work fine for input and output cells containing text. Comparing those files with a text editor might be an option depending on what kind of content is in the notebooks.The underlying problem here is the same one preventing versioning tools (git,...) from working efficiently/properly. $\endgroup$GitLink`NotebookDiffbut that package is not evolving too fast on GitHub. $\endgroup$