[TxMt] Req: Compare docs-Diff

[Fred B.]

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.