wrapping p4merge and p4diff for the cli

I love using p4merge and p4diff with git as my visual debugger; the scrolling presentation is just a little smoother than kdiff, Apple's merge tool or the stuff integrated into the various IDEs.

Here's side-by-side scrolling:

a dual pane editor with 2 copies of the same document open, one on left and one on right, with a paragraph
different. Scrolling shows the two documents stay aligned, but when the different paragraph is reached it moves
independently, so the common context above and below is aligned but the difference is obvious. The different
paragraph is highlighted in green.

Here's dual-file editing:

The same document displayed twice in p4merge, in a left and right pane. I click an edit button which is
colour coded to be specific to the right pane and a third pane opens on the bottom, and it's editable. As I add
update the text in the editor, the right pane also receives the update and p4merge highlights the difference.
Then I click a separate edit button that is colour-coded to be specific to the left pane, which opens in the same
editor pane and as I update it the left pane is live-edited to show the difference. The difference between both
documents that I introduced are saved to the file system.

The official docs tell you that if you want to integrate it with the command line then you have to write that integration yourself. It's annoying, but I wrote a bad version several years ago. I've since tweaked it a couple of times. Here's the two wrapper scripts I use.

p4diff


#!/bin/sh
[ $# -eq 7 ] && /usr/local/bin/p4merge "$2" "$PWD/$5"

p4merge


#!/bin/sh
/Applications/p4merge.app/Contents/MacOS/p4merge $*