git diff on JSON is mostly noise. So I built a structural diff.

You change one value in a JSON config, run git diff , and get a wall of red and green — because a formatter reflowed the file, or the serializer reordered the keys, or the indentation shifted by two spaces. The one thing you actually changed is buried in there somewhere. Good luck finding it in review. The problem is that git diff and diff work on lines . JSON isn't lines — it's a tree. So I built jdelta : it compares the data , ignores key order and whitespace entirely, and tells you exactly which values changed, addressed by path. Zero dependencies, no network. What it looks like $ jdelta config.before.json config.after.json Added (1) + features.darkMode true Changed (2) ~ auth.required true → false ~ server.port 8080 → 3000 +1 -0 ~2 auth.required flipped to false and you can see it instantly — no scrolling past 200 lines of reindented braces. Why not git diff / diff ? Because they diff text. Run a formatter, sort your keys, change two spaces of indent, and a line differ lights up the whole file while reporting zero semantic change. jdelta parses both sides and walks the trees: Object keys show as user.profile.age ; array elements as items[2].price . Odd keys fall back to quoted brackets ( ["order-id"] ). A key on only one side is added / removed ; a key on both with a different value is changed . A type change ( number → string , object → array ) is one changed entry tagged with the kinds — not a confusing add + remove. Reordered keys and whitespace produce nothing , because they aren't data changes. Great for reviewing config changes, API-response snapshots, tsconfig / settings.json , lockfile-adjacent files, and test fixtures. In scripts and CI jdelta a.json b.json --json # machine-readable: {added, removed, changed, summary} jdelta a.json b.json --quiet # just the +a -r ~c line jdelta a.json b.json --exit-code # exit 1 if they differ — gate a pipeline on it Install npx jdelta a.json b.json # Node build (npm) pip install jdelta # Python build — same behavior Tw