Feature request: Better support for ad-hoc comparison of non file text

[chrestomanci]

Hello

Fairly often I use Cirrus to compare text fragments that are not in files (or at least not in files I can easily pass to Cirrus). What I do, is I start a new Cirrus file compare session without specifying any files to compare. In the blank left an right panes I paste the text I am interested in comparing. This might for example be the verbose output of a program I am debugging before and after a change.

Problems.

1. The automatic alignment does not work properly unless you help it with the align manually function. You can't press F5 to reload and re-do the alignment because the files are not on disc anywhere.

2. You can't apply input filters to the text again because the data does not exist on disc anywhere. I was recently trying to compare some data where the order of the lines was unimportant, so I wanted to use the sort filter, but that could not be used.

[Aaron]

You'll want to use File->Open Clipboard, rather than pasting in Text. That should clear up your issues.

[Michael Bulgrien]

You can also right-click in the left or right pane and choose Open Clipboard from the context menu.

[chrestomanci]

You'll want to use File->Open Clipboard, rather than pasting in Text. That should clear up your issues.

Unfortunatly that does not do what I want to do, as it appears that Cirrus is using the same clipboard for both left and right. I guess it would work well if one side was a regular file and the other side a live view of the clipboard, but the way I am using it, both sides are pasted in.

What I have tried doing, is using the "open clipboard" function to add text for each side. Up to that point it works fine, and I see differences, but if I change the view or comparison mode, then Cirrus rescans both sides, and as they both come from the same clipboard they are shown as identical.

[Tim]

Are you using the current release? We recently made some improvements to clipboard handling.

Pasting on an empty side is now the same as "Open Clipboard". And now you can have <clipboard> on both sides of the comparison and they don't interfere with each other.