Using Meld or Visual Studio Code to accomplish file differencing. Useful for managing large numbers of repos / projects, particularly for templates.

python -m meldutils project/myfile.f90 ~/code

graphically compares project/myfile.f90 with every other file of the same name recursively under ~/code.

Particularly on Windows, the GUI may be invoked, but you don't see any difference. This is often because only one of the two files as a trailing \n or \r\n. Meld won't show any difference, even with all text filters off. Because of how Python filecmp.cmp works, there isn't a blazing fast simple solution to this. A possibly slow solution would be using str.replace.

So just realize it's OK, close Meld when it shows no difference and happy comparing!

Reference