[steerablesafe]

The proper way to diff .docx documents would be to Microsoft release a diff tool for .docx documents. If they released a three-way merge tool as well then it could be used in git too. git supports 3rd party diff and merge tools for specific file formats.

[oblio]

It might be a lot of work and the benefits are not super obvious for them (other than community goodwill :-) ).

[markus92]

They already got the functionality to diff between two documents in Word. I use it all the time to see if legal made any changes while "forgetting" track changes.

[steerablesafe]

Maybe libreoffice should work on it for .odt then, together with various VCS plugins (mainly git and maybe hg). It could be an interesting differentiator feature.

Sure, it's hard to diff and merge tree data structures, but it doesn't have to be perfect. Text diffing and merging is already imperfect anyway, yet it's very useful.

[Tagbert]

It’s not something you could use from a command line but Microsoft Word already does very good dock comparisons. The feature is called “compare”.

Not sure why we would need this at a file system level. You’d need diff tools for all sorts of file type.