Displaying and comparing large, ugly explain plans

I frequently find myself dealing with large execution plans with several hundred steps and complex indenting - I'm sure most of you do too. I am wondering if I am missing out on any useful tools for viewing and, more particularly, diffing these? In general I am doing this at a console and therefore working with the output of one of the dbms_xplan.display functions so although I know there are some reasonably good GUI tools, I don't often have access to them. Standard text diffs tools don't handle this well.

Even when I do have access to a GUI, most do not seem to support diffs between plans and I frequently find I am looking at very subtle variations in large plans. For example, Oracle SQL Developer supports visual plan diffs I believe, but only if fetched by the GUI i.e. it cannot compare several already in the AWR or the library cache.

Any pointers to other tools/scripts or suggestions of best practices?

Thanks,
cam

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