On Dec 20, 2005, at 1:16 AM, Michael A. Alderete wrote:
I am wondering if, either as part of Allan's documentation effort, or as some bundle maintainer's efforts, a simple "How to Find Differences Using TextMate" document could be written. Because I confess, I am at sea as to how to get a useful, usable diff of two similar documents.
[snip]
Hey Michael.
There's actually a Diff bundle ... definitely in the svn repositories (I'm guessing that its not in the default ones) ... go do an svn co of the Bundles (instructions on the wiki) and toss out the ones you don't need ... the diff commands in there should be pretty self explanatory. Last I remember, there wasn't something like "active" diffing .. something of a live update of the diff as maybe your changing (manually) one file against the other (after the initial diff, that is) ... I could be wrong since I haven't used it in some time.
Still, it can be helpful nonetheless.
My gold standard for usable differences is (as many of the list postings discussed) BBEdit. In particular, it has a menu command, "Compare Two Front Documents", which provides a highly usable interface to locate, review, and merge/modify the differences between two open documents. FileMerge, while flawed in some important ways, also provides a reasonably useful way of interacting with two files. (The diff output of the Subversion bundle is not suitable to my group's needs.)
I never have used BBEdit's diff command, but apple's FileMerge application (that comes with the developer tools) I remember hitting me as pretty sweet when I saw it ... maybe we could whip up a TextMate command and put it in the Diff bundle that shoots over 2 files for FileMerge to compare ... at least everyone has free access to that app... not that I have a problem w/ BBEdit .. I'm just saying.
Hope that helps, -steve