Diffo Text Compare & Diff

SHEMRAANGA

About this app

Diffo compares two pieces of text and shows you exactly what changed — by line, by word, or character by character. Paste both sides, or open a file into either one, and see the differences counted and coloured.

Two files that look identical often are not. One has a trailing space. One uses a tab where the other uses four spaces. One was saved on Windows and ends its lines differently. Diffo's default is byte-exact and it draws whitespace on screen, so a difference you cannot see becomes one you can.

WHAT IS INSIDE

• Compare — both texts side by side with a running count of what differs
• Side by Side — the two versions lined up row for row, scrolling together
• Lines — the unified view with plus and minus, and a jump to the next difference
• Line — one changed line examined character by character, with the common run marked
• Words — which words were kept, removed or added, shown inline
• Characters — whitespace made visible: spaces, tabs, line endings, zero-width characters
• Stats — how alike the two really are, in lines, words and bytes
• Normalise — switches that relax the rules, each showing what it hides
• Export — a unified patch, the format diff and git already speak

HOW IT COMPARES

The line diff is a longest-common-subsequence over hashed lines, which is what diff itself does, written here in plain Java. Common prefixes and suffixes are stripped first, so two long files that differ in the middle are compared in a fraction of the work. Word and character comparisons run the same algorithm over smaller tokens inside a line that already differs.

NOTHING IS HIDDEN SILENTLY

Every normalisation is a switch you can see, and the count before and after is always on screen. Ignore trailing whitespace, treat Windows line endings as Unix ones, ignore case, ignore blank lines, ignore indentation, or normalise Unicode — and watch what each one does to the number. A switch never touches your text. It changes what Diffo calls a difference, not what either side contains.

A colour-blind palette is available, and the plus and minus marks in the unified view carry the meaning independently of colour.

NO ACCOUNT, NO NETWORK, NO PERMISSIONS

People paste contracts, logs and source code into a compare tool, so this matters. Diffo requests zero Android permissions, has no network code at all, and cannot browse your storage. Files reach it only through the system document picker, one at a time. Neither text is written to disk unless you export the result yourself. No sign-in, no subscription, no in-app purchase, no advertising.

WHAT IT WILL NOT DO

It will not merge the two sides for you — choosing a winner is an editor's job, not a viewer's. It compares plain text only, so a PDF or a document is never silently converted behind your back. It cannot fetch either side from a URL. And it keeps no record of what you compared.

Eight full-screen background themes are included under More. The interface is English throughout.