Differential: a TUI code reviewer with semantic grouping

Gogoout — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:21:24 +0000

Hi all — for those of you still reviewing code by hand, I built a tool to make that easier. There are plenty of alternatives out there already, but none of them quite checked all the boxes for me, so I made my own. Feedback welcome!

Here's what differential does differently:

It filters out echoes before anything else. Every hunk gets hashed into a "shape class" — strings, numbers, and identifiers get normalized away, so a signature change touching two hundred call sites collapses into a single class instead of two hundred separate things to read.

So that say a refactor would be filtered away. Granted this doesn't work every time (if the changes are all in different shape), but it's a cheap way to filter out noise.

It figures out what depends on what. It builds a symbol dependency graph straight from the AST using treesitter. Then orders groups foundation-first, so you hit an abstraction before you hit its consumers. Each group gets tagged foundation, consumer, mechanical, or noise, and cycles get reported instead of hidden.

The LLM then group the shapes. This is what produce you a reading plan where each plan is smaller.

It shows the declaration of a symbol at best effort. This is useful when you want to pull in some context about a symbol. You can press z on a highlighted symbol — a peek modal shows the declaration.

Search covers the whole change, not just diff hunks. / searches every changed files, with the current plan's files showed up on the top.

It can also renders the whole plan as a stack of synthetic commits you can read in tig or plain git log or your IDE. It can review a live GitHub PR or GitLab MR in place, replying to and resolving existing threads.

It's a terminal program written in rust with ratatui.

Repo: https://github.com/thepartly/differential

DEV Community: Gogoout

Differential: a TUI code reviewer with semantic grouping