Comparison Tool in GitHub (compare releases, or shas if necessary)

Question

Can someone recommend a comparison tool/add-on/ in GitHub. I'd like to see the code changes between two particular releases. It would be nice if it showed all the files that have changed and I could then drill down into each file of interest.

This link: https://github.com/blog/612-introducing-github-compare-view said there already is one in GitHub, but I can't see the "compare" button they refer to. The post is from 2010 so perhaps the feature was removed.

If there is nothing in for GitHub, perhaps some direction on just using Git to list all the files that have changed between the two releases. Then I'd need a way to see what those changes are for each file. Frankly though, this seems like something that would be a pain on the command line!

Thanks, Dave

Answer 1

Starting January 2020, you now have "a shortcut to compare across two releases":

You can now compare tags between two releases – in order to determine what changes have been made – by clicking on the Compare ▾ button for a given release.

That give you a URL like https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/compare/v1.11.0-rc1...release/v1.11

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Oct. 2023, you also have gh compare

Answer 2

Github supports the split view in compare pages. Just add ?diff=split to the url and you'll be fine. E.g. https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/v5.0.2.rc1...v5.0.2?diff=split. Github remembers your preferred comparison view. To reset it, write ?diff=unified instead.