diffai

A terminal diff viewer with inline commenting, built for reviewing code changes alongside Claude Code.

Technologies Used:

diffai is a TUI diff viewer purpose-built for the two-pane Claude Code workflow. Open it alongside Claude Code, annotate the lines that need attention, and pass the saved notes directly to Claude with a single @ reference.

No API keys. No network calls. Purely local.

Install

curl -fsSL https://joshfinnie.com/diffai/install.sh | sh

How It Works

Run diffai review in any git repo and it opens a split view: a file tree on the left, the diff on the right. Navigate with arrow keys, press c to drop a comment on any line, and quit with q. On exit diffai saves your annotations to /tmp/diffai-<timestamp>.md.

In Claude Code, reference that file:

@/tmp/diffai-1234.md

Claude gets your comments alongside the real source line numbers — no pasting, no reformatting.

Keybindings

Key	Action
`Tab`	Switch focus between Files and Diff panels
`↑` / `↓`	Navigate files or diff lines
`PgUp` / `PgDn`	Fast scroll the diff
`Enter` / `→`	Open selected file in diff panel
`[` / `]`	Shrink / grow the file tree panel
`s`	Toggle split / unified diff view
`c`	Add or edit a comment on the cursor line
`d`	Delete the comment on the cursor line
`Shift+Enter`	New line in comment input
`Esc`	Cancel comment input
`q` / `Ctrl+C`	Quit

Vim keybindings (j/k/h/l, g/G, Ctrl+d/u, i for comment) can be enabled with [keys] vim = true in ~/.config/diffai/settings.toml.