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diff and cvs diff is very important when programming; BTW, their output is not such user-friendly, even you use diff -urpN or diff -y or cvs diff -uRpN. Sometime you may hope to redirect their output to a text file and further more edit with VI; but this is not perfect since you need to run 2 different programs for a single simple task. At this moment, colordiff will be a good choice for you. Manual message from man colordiff:

colordiff is a wrapper for diff and produces the same output as diff but with coloured syntax highlighting at the command line to improve readability. The output is similar to how a diff-generated patch might appear in Vim or Emacs with the appropriate syntax highlighting options enabled. The colour schemes can be read from a central configuration file or from a local user ~/.colordiffrc file.

Install colordiff in Debian etch is very simple. Just run this command:

To test its powerful effect, let's compare 2 file with:

For sure that you can combine it with cvs diff, too. E.g.:

So our next question should be: howto fully utilize colordiff in order to decrease our workload? Some simple bash shell script alias will give us a very handy help. Edit your ~/.bash_profile and add the following 2 lines, so replace diff as colordiff as default, and always display color with less:

The case of cvs diff is a bit more complicated. Here suggest for a handy function wrapper for simplify the work (Well, this seems not my cup of tea...). Add this to your ~/.bash_profile and run cvsdiff as replacement of cvs diff:

function cvsdiff () { cvs diff $@ | colordiff; }