Been deep in Claude stuff for a couple months there and didn’t get a chance to post anything. But today I had a git diff with something like these lines:
- if (!foo || bar) {
+ if (!foo || bar) {and added whitespace was showing in other parts of the diff as red blocks, so I thought this couldn’t be whitespace. ChatGPT said to try git diff | cat -vet and it outputted something like
- if (!foo || bar) { $
+ if (!foo || bar) {$where $ is end-of-line. So I think I deleted the whitespace and that’s why it wasn’t showing up as a red block—that was only added whitespace.
So the -vet flag for cat is three flags:
v: (“visible”) Show non-printing characters visibly (except tab and newline).e: (“end-of-line”) Show end-of-line as$.t: (“tab”) Show tabs as^I
Pretty handy! And definitely illuminating, especially after that quite suspect diff. 😒
Aside: This is my first non-test post written and published in Xin. It’s alive!