At 5:33 PM +0100 2/18/05, Fred B. wrote:
But I do see several people mention the diff thing, so it's not out of the question that I may see the advantages of having it built in, but then we're talking 1.3.
Common' several people, stand up! ;)
As one who spoke in appreciation of BBEdit's diff, I think it should *not* be a priority for Allan. Sorry. :)
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.).
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.
Chris Thomas writes:
BBEdit's diff implementation is about the least UI work you can do and still claim to have a diff feature.
I don't think that's completely fair. After all, Torsten's quick hack gives diff, but has less effect.
In BBEdit, you have two normal document windows placed side-by-side, and below them, you have this custom window... This window provides all of the diff logic (from a UI perspective). There isn't even unique graphics or interaction in the source windows, it just selects the differences using the normal selection mechanism.
With just a few TM callbacks exposed, we could duplicate this functionality via scripting.
I agree, this is what I meant by 'infrastructure' above. And the callbacks would be very helpful for other causes as well. For instance, if a command could output highlighted text (not sure what interface format, but let's pretend), then one could also quickly write a language-sensitive "highlight text out to the nearest braces" command.
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.
best wishes, Eric