Since you've used backticks, I assumed you want to obtain the output from vimdiff - which doesn't work that way, because vim talks to the terminal directly instead of printing to STDOUT. That's why I suggested diff instead, which does print to STDOUT.
If you want to spawn an interactive vim, just use system - works fine here.
In reply to Re^3: Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal
by moritz
in thread Vim: Warning: Output is not to a terminal
by jeanluca
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