Re: git gui diff widget (was Re: [msysGit] Re: [cheetah] Questions about NOTES)

> Steffen Prohaska <prohaska-wjoc1KHpMeg@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > On Jan 30, 2008, at 5:03 AM, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
> > >
> > >Doing a diff against a random other tree-ish, or between two random
> > >tree-ishes would be possible, but a lot more of a challenge.
> > >
> > >The diff viewer in git-gui isn't exactly a reusable widget.
> > >We'd need to refactor that so it could take patch output from any
> > >of the patch generating git commands.  Doing such is on my list
> > >of things I'd like to fix in git-gui, but I haven't had time to
> > >do it yet.
> > 
> > Hmm, I'm not sure if such a full diff viewer is the most
> > important thing to address.  Most users (especially Windows
> > users) already have a favorite graphical diff tool and they expect
> > a mechanism to plug it into a git workflow.
> 
> I hear this a lot from a co-worker.  He really wants a side-by-side
> diff tool in git, as he doesn't like reading patches.  Me, I've
> never been able to read a side-by-side diff tool, but I can grok
> a unified diff quite easily.  To each his own, and git should help
> users as much as it can.
>  
> > I think a tool that presents the list of files with differences
> > and can launch an external tool for one of these files would be
> > very helpful.  I started to think about a command line version,
> > git-difftool, implementing this idea, but do not yet have code.
> > A GUI version would be preferable for cheetah anyway.  Maybe the
> > patch viewer you sketched above could provide a way to launch an
> > external tool for any of the files touched by the patch?  If the
> > widget would be reusable maybe it could also be used in gitk?
> 
> Yea, that makes sense.  But we may want to go the other way,
> that is reuse gitk's patch viewer.  Or something.  The two tools
> (git-gui and gitk) grew their diff viewers independently, though
> I have to say that git-gui's was inspired by gitk's, and the work
> that Paul did on gitool waaaaay back when.
> 
> Right now though I doubt there's a single line of code in common
> between them.  Hmm, I think they both use the Tk "text" widget.
> And a blue-ish color for hunk headers.  :)
> 
> 
> Adding a feature to git-gui to launch an external diff of that
> file against the index or HEAD shouldn't be too difficult, and I
> think is what would be most natural for the current UI.  The ugly
> part is pulling out the HEAD/index version into a temporary file
> and passing a nice -L (or something like) option to the user's diff
> viewer so they don't see the nasty temporary file name, but instead
> see a string that matches what git-gui is showing them.  And that
> option is going to differ for like every tool out there.  :-\
>