Two suggestions for the next version

[Steven]

Thanks for this great tool. I am using this with TFS and it is so much better then the built in compare and merge tool.

I have two suggestions for the next release.

I would like to see the currently selected lines and the bottom of the screen at full width (under both panes) and stacked left line on top and the right pane's line just underneth so that I don't need to scroll horizontally when the line contains differences that are out of view to the right.

Also If a line has a difference that is at the end of a long line and is not visible without scrolling horizontally, I would like a little indicator at the end of the visible area of the line (just before the splitter on the left pane, and just before the vertical scroll bar on the right pane) that indicates their is difference that is out of view on that line. I think this is important becuase if you are on a line that has two differences and one is at the beginning of the line and one is at the end of the line you may not realize there was the second difference out of view to the right.

- Steven

[jeffhostetler]

Thanks for the suggestions.

The first has been frequently requested. I'll add your vote for this one.

The second is new and would be quite helpful. I'll add it to the database.

Thanks,
jeff

[cwinte]

An option to soft-wrap long lines would be very useful globally, perhaps also a per line drop down triangle (I'd use the drop down) on overlength lines.
With a little care over size perhaps the number of diffs in a line could be shown/navigated:
(3> 26 Line 26 is this text....
becoming
26 Line 26 is this text....
\1/ 26 and here is my fist diff in line 26 which ....
\2/ 26 the second difference HERE....

Must admit this might get hairy with long and arbitary differences in lines so maybe a <back (3/8) next> for the third diff of 8?

Not to detract - still a brilliant help spotting edits and changes.
A BIG thanks to all

[jeffhostetler]

If I understand what you're suggesting, we'd have a
number-of-diffs-on-the-line field (adjacent to the line
number) that would show how many individual diffs
were on the line. this might be a denominator and
have the numerator indicate the number of diff at
the caret position. Maybe also have some small buttons
or something (around the X/Y) that would horizontally
scroll between them. I'll log a feature request for this.

As for soft-wrapping long lines, this has been requested
before (especially when printing). I'll add your vote.

As for having a drop-down for long lines, I'm not sure
how this would work. Perhaps you could elaborate some.

BTW, I should say that 3.2.0 is in final testing now and
should be released in the next few days. In it, I added the
ability to switch the window orientation from side-by-side
with vertical splitters to above-and-below with horizontal
splitters. With this you can easily toggle between the
two modes. It really helps when looking at files with long
lines.

thanks for the suggestions,
jeff

[jpretori]

Hi, I just had my first look at diffmerge, it looks absolutely super!

Two suggestions from me:

1) Instead of only allowing three possible tab widths (2, 4 and 8 characters), allow the user to enter a number. The company where I work has the convention of displaying a tab as three characters which, without this, will make diffmerge use here awkward.

2) When comparing two folders, it may be possible to optimize quite a bit by scanning through the smaller of the two folders to find comparable files (I didn't spend more than two minutes thinking about this, and have never worked on diff tools, so please shoot this down if necessary)

Cheers!
Johan

[jeffhostetler]

Hello, thanks for the suggestions.

I'll add a feature request to the database for selecting an arbitrary tabstop.
I think this is the second time someone has mentioned that they use 3 space tabs.

As for comparing folders, sorry but that wouldn't help. Scanning the directories and
matching up peers is the easy part (much like doing 2 "/bin/ls -R" commands and
merge sorting them into a list based upon the relative pathnames).

The hard (expensive) part is reading each pair of files and comparing them. Even
if you do the smart stuff (like exclude files with different sizes), you still have to
read them buffer by buffer and compare them somehow (either memcmp() or
MD5/SHA). I did include stuff to remember the sizes and timestamps, so subsequent
reloads should go much faster, but we have to pay for it the first time....

Thanks for the note,
jeff

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