[mkdirp]

> If you have consistent code style and formatting this tool is unnecessary

I disagree. I struggle to replicate it right now using a simple test, but I've seen the following rather infuriating and counter intuitive behaviour from Git/GNU diff. If you have a simple if statement such as:

    if (bla) {
      // do something
    }

And you were to add another statement at the end, after the closing curly brace, e.g.:

    if (bla) {
      // do something
    }

    if (bla2) {
      // do something else
    }

Git/GNU diff will sometimes show the following diff:

    diff --git 1/left 2/right
    index c2ea6f1..dc0e1c2 100644
    --- 1/left
    +++ 2/right
    @@ -1,3 +1,6 @@
     if (bla) {
       // do something
    +}
    +if (bla2) {
    +  // do something else
     }

This is basic example, but there's other similar things. For a simple change like the above, this isn't a huge issue, but for a bigger patch sets, it can take a minute to understand what is really going on.

[lolc]

Right, I frequently get angry at just how dumb diff really is. How it's greedy and can't recognize the best seams between blocks of code. But then when I think of simple rules that would improve the results, I see how they would lead to other problems in other places. So using syntax seems necessary.

[hoseja]

There is an option [0] to use non-default but still built-in git diff algorithms that might yield better results.

[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-diff#Documentation/git-diff.txt...

[NateEag]

I've used a few of the different git diff algorithms and still have had problems like these.