drbitboy
Lifetime Supporting Member
It's closer to the way I'm used to working.
PLCs are not programmed with IDEs.
LOL. Thinking we're normative is one thing; hoping to find a world where we are is just so ... optimistic.
Welcome to Industrial Automation, and say goodbye to [git diff] and anything else command-line. As noted, the industry started out trying to make all electricians programmers, or at least make them able to read a program. The survival of any company in the PLC industry that used a command-line interface could probably be measured in milliseconds.
There is a .L5X/XML export option in some A-B environments, and the file is XML, so it would almost meet your spec. That is, if XML, and especially a [git diff] of two XML files, were either human- or machine-readable.
And give up on command-line, although one option that might work is a RaspberryPI (putting on my helmet and moving into my air-raid shelter). There may be environments where this may be possible, but they are probably proprietary and not passed to customers, other than the occasional C/C++ Add-On capability.
Anyway, welcome to the forum; I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing near you.