Often times I want to preprocess files a bit before running a diffing tool such as vimdiff on them. For example, say I have two files - file1.txt, file2.txt . Instead of doing “vimdiff file1.txt file2.txt”, I would like to do

cut -f 1 file1.txt | sort > file1.txt_sorted
cut -f 2 file2.txt | sort > file2.txt_sorted
vimdiff file1.txt file2.txt
rm file1.txt_sorted file2.txt_sorted

The task here is to simplify this process.

vimdiff <(cut -f 1 file1.txt | sort) <(cut -f 1 file2.txt | sort)

This tip works with other diffing tools such as diff. The cool thing is that we no longer have to worry about managing temporary files.

Tested it on zsh 4.3.10