Smarter expand of hidden lines

[Michael Bulgrien]

There are times during a text compare that I want to see more lines above the the default context shown around a particular change. When I expand the hidden lines above the change (there may be a hundred or more lines) BC3 takes me to the beginning of the expanded section.

Please, if a user has selected a line that is visible on the screen, BC3 should keep that selected line on the screen. In other words, if the user selects a line above the hidden text, then the top of the hidden text should be visible when the hidden section is unfolded. If the user selects a line below the hidden text, then the bottom of the hidden text should be visible when the hidden section is unfolded. In either case, the line with focus should keep the focus and remain on the screen.

The only exception would be when the currently selected line is not visible on the screen. In that case, simply expand the hidden section leaving the text above the fold in the same position on the screen.

[Aaron]

Thanks for the suggestion, Michael. I'll make note of it in our Customer Wishlist.

Instead of using the expand and collapse buttons, what if you toggled between Show Differences and Show All? How does this work for you?

[Michael Bulgrien]

That certainly does work much better and I'll keep it in mind for the future. However, this work-around also expands the lines following the current change so that I can no longer see the list of upcoming differences on the screen below the current one. Since I've already looked at the prior differences, I don't care so much if a section above where I am working is expanded, but I do want to be able continue working down through the remainder of my differences without having to toggle "same lines" on and off just to see additional context above the current difference. Nevertheless, in light of the many other enhancement requests I've made, I would say that, with your suggested work-around, I would consider this request to be low priority.

[Aaron]

Hello Michael,

As another workaround, you can use the left/right arrow keys to immediately jump to the cursor if it is moved off screen.

I talked with some of the developers and we actually had behavior similar to your request in an early version of BC3. We changed it to the current behavior due to customer feedback that after expanding a large entry there was no way to easily collapse it again.

[Michael Bulgrien]

We changed it to the current behavior due to customer feedback that after expanding a large entry there was no way to easily collapse it again.

And... my recommendation was to respect the user's current cursor position. If the text cursor is before the [+] fold point, then the user can expand and collapse a large section easily without having to scroll the screen. If the user places the text cursor after the fold point, then they can see the bottom of the hidden text when they expand it. This is a best-of-both-worlds scenario, and the user can control which happens simply with the placement of the text cursor prior to expanding... a whole lot more intuitive than having to arrow left then arrow right as a work-around to find your spot again.

[Aaron]

In that scenario, the expand/collapse command is generally moved if the cursor is below, requiring the user to move their mouse around if they ever wanted to "peek" at the context section. If the section is large and cursor below, then the +/- button could be pushed off the screen entirely. The current logic is to follow the focus of the last action taken (the mouse click) and there are a couple of alternate commands or actions (arrow key press) that can provide the alternate behavior.