Possibility to specify a custom diff tool

Question

Is it possible to specify a custom file comparison tool?

I noticed that e.g. notepad++ with the comparePlus plugin is more powerful than the integrated comparer of VSC.

Answer 1

As far as I know, no. And intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me why an editor with builtin diff tooling would provide a in-baked mechanism to invoke an external diff tool on a file.

You can, however, do the following:

Copy the path to the file you want to open diff info for

• If that file is the currently active file, you can do this with the File: Copy Path of Active File (which is bound to ctrl+alt+c on windows and linux).

• Otherwise, right click the file in the VS Code explorer, and then click the "Copy Path" menu item.

And then either:

• Configure what difftool is used by git when you invoke git difftool, which you can do from the terminal, and then invoke git difftool with the path to that file and whatever other arguments you want.

• Or directly invoke your tool of choice from the commandline (instead of through git difftool) and pass it that file's path.

You could also write an extension to do this and save yourself some steps.