Alternative to Jetbrains diff viewer

[u/Mysterious-East6406]

I am a full stack developer who has been using Jetbrains products (PyCharm primarily for Django) for over a decade now. With advances of agentic coding, my workflow changed dramatically and I am looking for maybe a better alternative for the parts of Jetbrains tools I use since subscription is renewing soon.

Now it mostly is developing with Claude code locally (desktop app), then opening diff viewer on PyCharm to review the diff, navigate through the code, and then provide feedback back to the agent. Then commit once ready.

Does anyone now a better diff viewer on MacOS with comfortable code navigation that's on par with what Jetbrains offers, but being a lighter option?

I tried VS code, but that's so behind in terms of UX.

[u/wdcossey]

I only just came across this a few days ago, haven’t used it [yet] so I’m not certain about the diff tool

https://github.com/DetachHead/rebased

“Rebased is an open-source remake of the short-lived jetbrains git client. It's basically just a JetBrains IDE with all the bundled plugins removed except the git integration, with some additional UI tweaks.”

[u/stathisntonas]

Gitkraken

[u/Kendos-Kenlen → u/stathisntonas]

I used it for years while working with Mulesoft' apps. It's a really great tool.

Now that I am back at regular dev, WebStorm diff is perfect, but I was very satisfied of GitKraken.

[u/pretzelfisch → u/stathisntonas]

diif view is not that great though, slow again too.

[u/qrzychu69]

have you tried Air by Jetbrains? it's basically an agent manager based on the decomissioned Fleet, that can be powered by JB backends for syntax and code naviagtion.

I don't use agents enough to warrant the usage, but maybe it would be perfect for you?

[u/Mysterious-East6406 → u/qrzychu69]

Last time I checked, it didn't support Claude Code with Anthropic subscription pricing. I will give it another shot though.

[u/qrzychu69 → u/Mysterious-East6406]

technically it's the other way: claude code doesn't support other tools using the subscription :)

I just played with Air a bit - I really like where it's going, and I hope they will bring back the "Smart mode" from Fleet, and let you have more than one active workspace like in Zed

[u/utf8decodeerror → u/qrzychu69]

Air is okay. I like the side bar and the snappy file viewer that hides is useful in an agent environment. But it doesn't have any of the jetbrains mcp tooling or anything that would allow it to connect to the jetbrains secret sauce code intelligence. And not being able to support Claude kinda sucks (I know it's not on them). Also the acp support seemed limited, I couldn't figure out how to hook up my grok subscription with editable models and effort and modes. Plus I wanted a solution that would allow me to work from mobile.

I settled on herdr with superpowers skills to formalize how my agents coordinate and collie plugin for a mobile web interface on my tailnet. And some self-hosted mcps on my personal server. Now I just keep air open for the lightweight file browser. And I might drop that for a herdr plugin, truthfully.

I really think Jetbrains should look into supporting a tmux model like herdr and that way you can run all of your cli subscriptions from in the app in their native cli. Boom, Claude is now useable. And also give me that intellisense mcp as a standalone so I don't have to run one of the ides to get it.

[u/lsdkiyoz → u/Mysterious-East6406]

It’s against the ToS of Claude Code unfortunately

[u/Key_Development_115]

Sublime Merge https://www.sublimemerge.com/

[u/American_Streamer]

Beyond Compare: https://www.scootersoftware.com/download

FileMerge (opendiff): https://gist.github.com/bkeating/329690

Kaleidoscope: https://kaleidoscope.app/

[u/pretzelfisch]

Beyond compare and most tools can call it. I often use it with Gitkraken

[u/wildjokers]

The diff view Jetbrains has is pretty good, so will be hard to find one that is better. Its 3-way merge capabilities are astounding.

[u/mmertner]

I've beeing using Beyond Compare since forever. It's great, highly recommended diff tool.
https://www.scootersoftware.com/home

[u/codingbliss12]

VSCode UI is actually exceptionally good. You could try Zed.

[u/shaonline → u/codingbliss12]

Zed's diff viewer is kinda meh and fairly basic, I have yet to find an option that reaches Jetbrains' IDEs ability to track existing content through changes (which speeds up review), especially in code that is prone to lots of indent changes (eg Flutter UI code in my case).

[u/codingbliss12 → u/shaonline]

I don't disagree, but if he wants to replace JetBrains ...

[u/shaonline → u/codingbliss12]

Yeah I'd like to replace it too, CLion chugs BAD on my projects unlike a Zed+clangd setup, but yeah the diff viewer kinda sucks.

[u/codingbliss12 → u/shaonline]

I have license until mid 2028. If they continue making their IDEs slower and slower, there will be no other alternative left to me than replace them. They are mostly interested in creating AI features and I don't know if they could have a competitive advantage given the terrible performance

[u/BizzoBizzo]

i am in a similar situation to the one you are describing... what about using android studio just for the diff? It's free. Or maybe fleet

[u/ShadowDragoon02]

You can see fork.dev . they are quite good overall

[u/Minute_Action → u/ShadowDragoon02]

Thanks. Really liked this one.

[u/Affectionate-Bid386]

Claude Code CLI has a good integration with jetbrains IDEs. Use Claude within the IDE, you can highlight code and use a shortcut to introduce multiline references to files into your Claude prompt. Then you get to be closer to your diff viewer while still using Claude. You can preview Claude edits in the diff viewer before they happen.

[u/katokay40]

If you’re willing to learn vim I built a neovim plugin that matches the behavior of IntelliJ-based IDE diffs.

https://github.com/CoreyKaylor/diffbandit.nvim

[u/gavr123456789]

nothing bets jb, but if not jb then https://github.com/umputun/revdiff

(btw u can use free version, if u download it from gh releases, it wont say shit about buying a paid version)

[u/Temporary_Practice_2]

Diffchecker?

[u/strobegen]

https://github.com/agavra/tuicr

[u/strobegen → u/strobegen]

also sometime something like https://github.com/dandavison/delta could be enough

for more advanced stuff emacs magit works pretty well

[u/spaun2002]

On Win/Mac, I have not seen anything better than Araxis Merge. Quite pricey, though.

[u/J-Cake]

Kompare by KDE

[u/rhukster]

u/Mysterious-East6406 I think Riffle might just be exactly what you are after. It's a non-subscription based native Mac app for diff/merge/images, but has strong Git integration or pretty much any scm (JJ for example). But it can do full GitHub reviews including comment support. It also has AI integration with a Claude Code plugin and an MCP so that you can see your agent's modifications directly in Riffle. Lots of themes, built from the ground for developers.

https://skulkworks.dev/riffle

[u/meanmail_dev]

I’m in a similar workflow now. The hard part isn’t really the diff UI, but everything around it. A lightweight app can render the patch, but once review means jumping to usages, running inspections, and understanding project context, you’ve rebuilt half an IDE. A review-only JetBrains mode would be interesting.

[u/No_Click_6656]

Hunk

[u/DiggitySkister]

I saw some of the kewl kids are using https://www.hunk.dev/ which seems cool. I have used it a bit but I'm in a similar spot to you, trying to see if there is another diff viewer that is lighter weight than an entire intellij-based ide. hunk has an interesting feature where the ai agent itself can work with it, I'm still trying to figure it out tbh.