(Second attempt as submitting this, see comment in https://nest.pijul.com/pijul/nest/discussions/62)

pijul diff --untracked --short appends untracked files to the output, while pijul diff --untracked without --short (default output or json) replaces the output with a list of untracked files.

The --help string for it just says “Include the untracked files”, which led me to expect the first type of behavior for all flags. It’s also a bit surprising to have different behavior depending on whether or not --short is passed. On the other hand, I can see why the current behavior might be useful.

I’m not sure what the right design choice is for the command line interface, but if the interface isn’t “wrong”, the help text should probably be updated to reflect the behavior. Maybe something like “List untracked files (with --short include untracked files in the list)”.

I’m concerned that the diff output doesn’t match standard diff output, and the -u flag means untracked instead of unified, as it does in standard diff.

Perhaps the –untracked should be on the list command instead since we don’t have a status command.

My use case is adding Pijul commands to the Perl utility commit-patch which already handles 7 different VCSs, including Darcs. See the simple code here that uses the VCS’ diff command output: https://github.com/caldwell/commit-patch/blob/master/commit-patch