Show Context background color

[Michael Bulgrien]

More than once I've been confused when I launched BC and set a filter only to find that some filtered lines remained visible. More than once I've started to author a post on the forums to report a filter failure...only then to figure out that I had the "Show Context" toggle enabled.

Suggestion: It would be much easier to identify lines that remain visible due to the "Show Context" toggle if the background color was set to the background color of the filtered lines (see screenshots):

Current


Proposed

[Chris]

Michael,

Thanks for the suggestion. The problem with using a different background color for the context lines is that you're losing information. You can turn on "Show Context" with "Show Differences", but you can also turn it on with "Show Same".

If you change the background color, you wouldn't know if the context lines contain matches or mismatches. You could look at the color of the text in the context lines to indicate if it was a match or mismatch, but if the lines were long enough to require scrolling, you could miss an indication of a match or mismatch.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Thanks for the explanation, Chris. It was just a thought...and low priority at that.

What would be more useful to me is the ability to temporarily disable the difference filters in a text compare in the same way that we can ignore the file filters in a folder compare. Please see my comments in this post.

Could you please add this to a list of considerations for a future enhancement?

[Michael Bulgrien]

You can turn on "Show Context" with "Show Differences", but you can also turn it on with "Show Same".

FYI - I tried toggling "Show Context" with a "Show Same" filter, and it didn't make any difference. All filtered differences remained filtered.

[Chris]

Michael, you are correct, I didn't realize "Show Context" only affected "Show Differences".

For the context line coloring, I discussed this with the development team. They actually tried alternate coloring for context lines in an early beta of v3, but they didn't like it. We won't change the default coloring, but I'll add a wish list item to make the color configurable. It would probably be set as one color for any filtered text. This would include lines displayed with "Show Context" and lines made visible by clicking to expand the "N filtered lines" text.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Thanks Chris.