SavePoint Diff

See what you've changed since your last save — without Git.

SavePoint Diff adds live, colour-coded gutter markers and a familiar Source Control panel entry for your unsaved edits, updated on every keystroke. It works in any folder, Git repo or not — no .git folder, no network access, no external services required.

Why SavePoint Diff?

Git's gutter compares your file against the last commit. SavePoint Diff compares it against the last save — so you can see your in-progress edits even:

• between commits, in a messy/dirty working tree
• in folders that aren't a Git repository at all (scratch files, generated code, config directories, quick scripts)
• on files Git doesn't track

Features

🟢 🔵 🔴 Live gutter markers — green for added lines, blue for modified lines, red for deleted-line markers, recalculated on every edit, before you ever press save.

📁 Source Control panel integration — a "SavePoint Diff" entry lists every open file with unsaved changes, exactly like Git's own panel, complete with a "Save All" toolbar button and a per-file save icon — the same spot Git puts its commit button.

🔍 One-click full diff view — click a file (in the panel, or via its gutter/tab) to open VS Code's native split diff editor: your last-saved version on the left, your live, still-editable buffer on the right.

💾 Save straight from the panel — no need to switch back to the editor tab first: hit the Save All button at the top of the "SavePoint Diff" panel to save every unsaved file at once, or the inline save icon on a single row to save just that file. (The panel skips Git's commit-message input box entirely, since there's nothing to commit here.)

🏷️ Modified-file badges — an "M" badge on changed files in the Explorer and on editor tabs, the same visual language Git uses.

↺ Revert a single change — hover any gutter marker for a "↺ Revert this change" link that discards just that block back to its baseline content, without touching the rest of the file or needing a save first. Also reachable from the Command Palette (SavePoint Diff: Revert Change (at Cursor)), which acts on whichever change your cursor is currently in.

📊 Live change count in the status bar — the SavePoint: ON status bar item shows a running +added ~modified -deleted tally for the active file (e.g. SavePoint: ON +12 ~4 -2), so you can see the size of your unsaved edits at a glance without opening the diff view.

📍 Manual savepoints — SavePoint Diff: Create Savepoint snapshots the active file's current in-memory content as the new diff baseline, without saving anything to disk. Use it before a risky edit or refactor so you can diff against "a minute ago" instead of only "since I last hit Ctrl+S" — your editor tab's own unsaved-changes dot is completely unaffected.

🕒 Git-style snapshot history & restore — create named checkpoints of your file anytime (SavePoint Diff: Save Snapshot), or let SavePoint Diff automatically snapshot on every save. View your snapshot timeline (SavePoint Diff: View & Restore Snapshot...), inspect a split diff comparing any prior snapshot against your current buffer, or revert the entire file back to that snapshot with one click.

🌐 Works everywhere you code — local folders, Remote-SSH, WSL, Dev Containers, GitHub Codespaces, and virtual filesystems like vscode.dev / github.dev.

⚙️ Fully configurable — toggle each marker type, the overview ruler, optional background highlighting, and tune performance thresholds for large files.

🔒 100% local — everything runs inside the extension host. No Git, no telemetry, no network requests, no external services. Your baseline never touches disk; it exists only in memory for the current window session.

Getting started

Install the extension, open any file, and start typing — that's it. Gutter markers appear immediately as you edit and clear the moment you save. A status bar item (SavePoint: ON / SavePoint: OFF) lets you toggle the extension with one click.

Commands

Extension Settings

How it works

1. Baseline — when a file is opened, its content is captured as the "last saved" baseline.
2. Live diff — every edit is diffed against that baseline (using a small, well-established Myers line-diff library) and rendered as gutter markers, debounced so it stays fast even while typing quickly.
3. Save — pressing save resets the baseline to the new content and clears all markers; tracking starts fresh from there.
4. Undo/redo — always recomputed fresh from baseline vs. current text, so undoing back to your saved state naturally clears markers, and redoing naturally brings them back.
5. Reverts and external changes — if the file stops being "dirty" without a save (you ran Revert File, or something outside the editor rewrote the file while your buffer was clean), its content now matches disk by definition, so the baseline re-syncs automatically and markers clear.
6. Reverting one change — clicking a gutter marker's "↺ Revert this change" link (or running the command with your cursor in a change) applies a single edit that restores just that block's baseline content, then re-diffs — the rest of the file, and any other changes in it, are untouched.
7. Savepoints — SavePoint Diff: Create Savepoint moves the baseline to the file's current in-memory content immediately, without a disk write. Everything from here behaves exactly as if you'd just saved, except your editor tab still shows the file as unsaved (because it is) — a real Save later simply moves the baseline again, superseding the savepoint.

No Git objects, no filesystem snapshots, no manual delta tracking.

Requirements

• VS Code 1.60.0 or later.
• Nothing else — no Git, no other extensions, no network access.

Known limitations

• In Git repositories, VS Code's editor-gutter "quick diff" colours are typically driven by Git's own provider rather than this extension's — but SavePoint Diff's own gutter markers, Source Control panel entry, badges, and diff view all work independently of that, in Git and non-Git folders alike.
• Untitled files start with an empty baseline, so everything typed shows as "added" until you Save As — at which point the newly saved content becomes the real baseline.
• Non-UTF-8 files restored with unsaved changes after a restart (see "hot exit" in the changelog) have their on-disk baseline read as UTF-8. For a file in another encoding this can produce inaccurate markers until the next save; run SavePoint Diff: Refresh or save once to resync.
• A savepoint clears the "unsaved changes" UI, not the file's actual unsaved state. After SavePoint Diff: Create Savepoint, the Source Control panel entry, the "M" badge, and the status bar count all reflect "differs from the current baseline" — which, right after a savepoint, is "no differences" — even though the file still has real unsaved edits on disk. Rely on your editor tab's own dirty indicator (the ● dot) for whether you actually still need to press Ctrl+S, not on SavePoint Diff's surfaces, once you've used a savepoint.

Release Notes

See CHANGELOG.md for the full history — including several rounds of bug fixes, robustness improvements (stale badges on hidden tabs, redundant recomputes on toggle, CRLF and lone CR line-ending handling, descending edit sorting on multi-change reverts, background cancellation tokens, safe document resolution on save/revert, an invalid maxFileSize no longer able to silently disable diffing entirely, needless decoration rebuilds on unrelated settings changes, and more), automated test runner additions, and new features (Save All from the panel, per-change revert, the status bar change count, and manual savepoints) folded into the initial 0.1.0 release.

Contributing / building from source

See CONTRIBUTING.md for build, packaging, and manual test instructions.

Privacy

Everything happens locally, in-memory, inside the extension host. No network requests, no telemetry, no external services of any kind.

Links & Author

• GitHub: https://github.com/StayElite/SavePoint-Diff
• Documentation: https://github.com/StayElite/SavePoint-Diff/blob/main/README.md
• Issues: https://github.com/StayElite/SavePoint-Diff/issues

Created and maintained by Ashish Sharma (Stay Elite).

Copyright (c) 2026 Ashish Sharma (Stay Elite). Licensed under the MIT License — see LICENSE for details.