[feature] Add a --time-limit?

[melonmouse]

The runtime of difft depends on the inputs, hardware, state of the system, etc. Often, --byte-limit and --graph-limit are used to limit the maximum user time. But they are approximations. As difft improves, the ideal limits change, but limits set in dotfiles linger. A solution that fits user needs, and is robust under changes of inputs, difft, hardware etc: --time-limit, which reverts to a text diff (or a --fallback-diff passed in) after a set amount of time is used.

Thanks for working on difft, which I use every day and which is amazing. This is just a feature request, no worries if its out of scope.

[melonmouse]

An alternative is for users to create a script like this:

#!/bin/bash

timeout 3s difft "$@"
case $? in
  0)
    # [difft succeeded]
    ;;
  124)
    echo "[difft timed out.]"
    ;;
  *)
    echo "[difft failed.]"
    ;;
esac

So e.g. in .gitconfig, they can set:

[diff]
  external = /path/to/git-external-difft-with-timeout.sh

To my surprise, it seems git diff or difft automatically reverts to a text-only diff if difft fails (so on time-out, no explicit call to the fallback diff was needed in the above script).