I was messing around with the well known Unix command line utility diff and thought to myself “If we just want to see the differences easily (rather than making a patch file), wouldn’t it be better to get rid of all of these garbage characters and use colours for displaying the output instead?”.
So that’s what I did. Here’s the classic “computer” vs “boathouse” example, letter by letter (you would normally do line by line or word by word, which is far easier to read).
Not only is “cbompuathouser” an awesome word but if you cover up all of the green letters, you get “computer” while if you cover up all of the red letters, you get “boathouse”. Black letters are common to both so they are always visible. When this really gets interesting is when you change the red or green to the same colour as the text. In this case, we change the green background to a grey background and end up with a clearly legible word “computer” but now it looks like we have “Tipexed” (liquid paper) out all of the unneeded letters from “boathouse”, just as we would if we used a pen and paper.
This looks amazing when you do it on some big paragraphs that have a few differences in them.