Quickly diff the active file against any other file — open, unsaved, or anywhere in your workspace — without touching the command line.
A spiritual successor to fabiospampinato/vscode-diff, rebuilt on VS Code's native APIs with zero dependencies and proper support for unsaved and untitled files.
Usage
Open the file you want to compare (this becomes the left side).
Run Diff: File from the Command Palette (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P).
Pick a file from the quick pick — it opens in VS Code's native diff editor.
The picker groups candidates into three sections:
untitled — open untitled (never-saved) buffers
open — your other open files
workspace — every other file in the workspace
Works with unsaved files
This is the key difference from comparing files on disk. Both sides are diffed through their live editor documents, so:
Unsaved changes (dirty buffers) are diffed exactly as they appear in the editor.
Untitled files (never saved to disk) can be diffed directly.
No temporary files are written — the diff always reflects what you actually see.
Settings
Setting
Default
Description
diff.showOpenFiles
true
Show currently open files in the picker.
diff.showUntitledFiles
true
Show open untitled (never-saved) files in the picker.
diff.showFoundFiles
true
Show files found in the workspace in the picker.
diff.include
**/*
Glob pattern controlling which workspace files appear.
diff.exclude
""
Glob to exclude. When empty, VS Code's files.exclude and search.exclude are used.
Notes
Diffing operates on text editors. The currently focused editor must be a text file.
Binary/image diffing (supported by the original extension via temp files) is intentionally out of scope.
