Feature Requests

[boon]

Hi there,

I like the tool very much. Still there are some things I miss:
1.) Multi Line "Details area"
When comparing files with lots of diffs (near to each other) and browsing through the diffs with CTRL-N, it is a bit annoying for the eyes to "search" the current diff on the whole screen. When only one line was changed it is a lot easier to rest the focus on the "Details area" where the current lines are displayed. But with this method you miss changes, when diffs consist of more than one lines.
It would be a major improvement if you could make the details area allways display the whole diff (consisting of more than one lines), or as an alternative allways display a fixed number of lines as context. This last method could include the possibility for the user to adapt the number of lines simply by widening the Details area with the mouse.

2.) Advanced (auto) saved sessions
It would be nice if the tool could remember all the tabs (including cursor position) that were open, when the tool was closed last time.
Additionally it could be helpful if it would not simply store the pathnames of the files, but also the whole contents of them. Thereby the diffs shown would not be lost, if anyone changed the files in between (e.g. on a dynamic view).

3.) Recognition of moved lines
Example of a moved line between file A and B:
File A:
test
Voodoo
test
test
test

File B:
test
test
test
Voodoo
test

In this case BC shows the diff as a deletion plus an add. It would be nice to relate the two and instantly see, that the line was only moved (as in Notepad++ for example).

[Aaron]

Hello,

Thanks for the feedback. For point #1, might it help to customize our Display Filters and Importance/context? In general, we wouldn't want the main view to be difficult to read, so we can customize what differences are considered important and then only display the differences you care about. You can optionally include a few surrounding context lines. If this is still troublesome, a screenshot of a difficult to parse area might help either as an example or we may have other suggestions to improve the comparison.

For #2, we have some of this in the concept of Workspaces. A Workspace can be saved or loaded, and contains the current window positions, loaded paths/sessions, etc. We don't save the cursor position and reload the comparison, however, since the comparison may be different at this point and we wouldn't want to show stale or incorrect information. You can configure a workspace to auto-save on close, and auto-load on start, in the Options dialog, Startup section.

[boon]

(I´ve added a 3rd point above)

Thank you for your answers.

For #1:
I´m not sure if I understand your answer correctly. How can I include surrounding context lines?
When I have a multiline difference I never see more than one line in the details area. E.g.:
File A:
a
a
b
b
b
a
a

File B:
a
a
C
C
C
a
a

Here I only see the first line of the three line diff in the details area:
"
--> b
<-- C
"

It would be nice to see the whole diff:
"
--> b
--> b
--> b
<-- C
<-- C
<-- C
"


For #2:
Thanks for the clarification. It would still be nice to be able to save the cursor positions as well as the whole file contents optionally. If the saved-and-possibly-out-of-date files would be marked / renamed accordingly, this should not be a problem, should it?

[Aaron]

Hello,

For #1, the context number is defined in the Options dialog, File Views, Text section: "Number of context lines". Then in the Text Compare, set to Display Differences in the toolbar, and toggle the Show Context toolbar button. This would only show different text in the main view, with X surrounding equal lines. This does not impact the Text Details section, which is only for one line at a time.

For #2, cursor position is tricky to track since it may be within a word or phrase that then no longer exists or has been moved or edited. Or additional text as been added above so the line number is now different. There is nothing we can assume about the files as we reload them, which makes decisions of where to save the cursor position sub-optimal in different scenarios. We wouldn't want an interface that encourages skipping over sections that might need review.

For the new #3, detecting moved sections is on our wishlist. We currently support Sorting files to help with these sections, similar to this KB article on RESX files:

http://www.scootersoftware.com/support.php?zz=kb_externalconversion

Or our additional downloads for specific formats like HTML Tidy or XML Tidy.
Better internal support is something we would like to tackle, but is a large project and may vary based on format by format.