[TxMt] How to actually do a diff in TextMate?

[Steve Lianoglou]

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