🔍 difit: Preview GitHub-like diffs locally before you push

Yuji Ueki — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 13:54:07 +0000

📝 This is a short introduction to difit — a tiny CLI tool that lets you preview Git diffs in a GitHub-style interface, right from your local machine, with no installation required.

🤔 Ever wish you could preview your GitHub diff before you push?

You're working on a feature, writing commits one by one.

Before opening a pull request, you want to double-check your changes—

But git diff in the terminal is messy, and pushing just to preview the PR feels wasteful.

Enter difit: a lightweight CLI tool that lets you see your Git changes in a GitHub-like diff view, right in your browser — locally.

🚀 What is difit?

difit launches a local web UI that mimics GitHub’s diff view, showing you a full side-by-side comparison of your Git changes — all from a single command.

You don’t even need to install anything.

⚡ Quick start (no install needed)

You can run difit instantly using npx:

npx difit

This will:

Launch a local server
Open your browser
Show a visual diff between your current working tree and the last commit

🖼 Example screenshot

Looks just like GitHub, right?

🧩 File-by-file diff
🌈 Syntax highlighting
📄 Foldable sections
🧘 Clean UI for peaceful reviews

🔧 Other usage examples

Show staged & unstaged changes (default)

npx difit

Compare against another branch (e.g. main)

npx difit origin/main

Compare two commits explicitly

npx difit abc123..def456

Compare current changes

npx difit          # HEAD commit changes
npx difit .        # All uncommitted changes (staged + unstaged)
npx difit staged   # Staged changes ready for commit
npx difit working  # Unstaged changes only (cannot use compare-with)

💡 Why use difit?

🔍 Preview before pushing

See what your PR will look like before opening it.

🧼 Spot mistakes early

Catch debug logs, leftover TODOs, or secret keys before they go public.

📋 Review your own work visually

Especially helpful before pushing large commits or squashed branches.

⛔ Avoid pushing just to review

No need to create throwaway PRs just to read a diff.

💻 Works offline

No GitHub token, no auth, no internet required.

🙋‍♂️ About the author

difit is developed by @yoshiko_pg, who creates practical and elegant dev tools with minimalism and clarity in mind.

Check out the project here:
🔗 https://github.com/yoshiko-pg/difit

🧪 Final thoughts

GitHub’s diff viewer is great — but it’s gated behind a push.
difit removes that barrier.

Now you can review your code visually before it ever leaves your machine.

Give it a try. Just one command:

npx difit

And you’re reviewing like it’s already a PR ✨

mdts – A Simple CLI Tool to Browse Local Markdown Files in a Web UI

Yuji Ueki — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:57:52 +0000

Have you ever wanted to browse your local Markdown files like a wiki – instantly, with no setup or configuration?

That's why I created mdts (Markdown Tree Server) – a command-line tool that lets you serve any folder of Markdown files in your browser, complete with a navigable file tree and clean Markdown preview.

🔧 What is `mdts`?

mdts is a lightweight CLI tool that runs a local web server for browsing Markdown files in a directory. It’s designed for:

Local note-taking and journaling
Previewing documentation before publishing
Exploring markdown-based project folders
Building a local personal wiki

🛠️ Features

📁 Web-based tree navigation of your file system
📄 Clean Markdown rendering, styled for readability
⚡ No config, no setup – just run one command
🌐 Offline-first – works entirely on your local machine
🧩 Single binary (via NPM) – no dependency hell

🚀 Usage

In any directory you want to preview,

npx mdts

It will launch your default browser automatically, showing a tree of Markdown files and folders that you can browse and read.

🧪 Under the Hood

Built with Node.js
Uses Express.js for the server
Markdown rendering via React Markdown + custom styling

No frontend framework – just HTML/CSS/JS and a bit of magic ✨

🔓 Open Source

GitHub:
👉 https://github.com/unhappychoice/mdts

The project is fully open source and open to contributions.
If you find it useful or want to see new features (like search or edit mode), I’d love your feedback!

If this sounds useful to you, feel free to give it a ⭐ on GitHub and share it with others who work with Markdown.

Thanks for reading! 🙌

DEV Community: Yuji Ueki