On 18 févr. 05, at 19:26, Eric Hsu wrote:
As one who spoke in appreciation of BBEdit's diff, I think it should *not* be a priority for Allan. Sorry. :)
I never asked it to be in the next release, of course. An "it's on the bottom of the to-do list" would be a good start. ;)
I personally prefer that he works on providing infrastructure that can support add-on work by procrastinators like the current bunch of bundle writers. I would rather he work on exposing some of the power that might lead to someone else writing a good version of the diff and that would be good for other stuff (like letting commands/urls select-highlight text; letting urls call commands, etc.).
Sometimes, my english is not good enough to express exactly what I mean, sorry, but be sure i'd prefer to see "some of the power that might lead to someone else writing a good version of the diff and that would be good for other stuff " too. Change my request to "please, Allan, expose "some of the power, etc ". ;)
I'm curious now how diff fits in your workflow. Are you constantly comparing to previous versions? I use diff maybe a couple times a week when I can't tell the difference between two similar files. If diff were the most important thing to me, I might have stayed with BB. Maybe you should install svn and use the svn bundle, which I might add looks great.
I work on a lot of very different things (music, cd/dvd authoring, video, writings, xhtml, css, Rails, Ruby, Xcode, etc.), so I often need to check what I've done on a project lately. I already use svn and the svn bundle a lot, but : - Not everything I work on is on svn and the svn diff, even if svnX makes it much better, is still much less friendly than comparing two docs à la BBE/TW/FileMerge. - Sometimes, I have to compare a file to something else than one of its ancestors. An example: I work on a site that uses multiple stylesheets (the user can switch between them). And as I don't edit and test both of them at the same time, it's easier to check the one I'm working with the others to see what I've changed. I even dream of a way to compare more than 2 files, and maybe to be able to make edits in all of them at the same time. Ok, ok, I calm down.
Diff is not "the most important thing to me", but still... And NO, I won't go back to BBE! ;)
Chris Thomas writes:
BBEdit's diff implementation is about the least UI work you can do and still claim to have a diff feature. With just a few TM callbacks exposed, we could duplicate this functionality via scripting.
Yes, I think it could even be possible to recreate the compare command in BBE/TW with applescript. Maybe it's an applescript, in fact... That's why I took it as example, It seemed "simple enough". (I don't mean that implementing the necessary AS support in TM would be simple at all!)
A better implementation would provide a modern, polished version of FileMerge's view. That would almost certainly require Objective-C (or F-script) plugins if done by a third-party, though.
That would be really neat. FileMerge looks pretty great. It isn't too fun to edit with though.
Exactly.