Re: [RFD] Strange patch formats (aka tricks with unified diffs)..

From: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Date: Apr 13, 2007, 05:43 UTC
Message-ID: <17951.6252.457936.428919@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0704121436050.4061@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds writes:

>  - bug Paul about alternate diff viewing capabilities in gitk. He's cc'd 
>    here. A way to make the "diff" pane show just the new one, the old one, 
>    or even both side-by-side with some mousy interface?

Showing just the old lines, or just the new lines, would be dead easy, since the Tk text widget has an "elide" option on tagged ranges of text that effectively removes them from the display. So I don't even have to change the contents of the text widget, merely the display options associated with the tags that I already have attached to the old and new lines (that's how they get their color).

Side-by-side would be more challenging.

Alternatively I could provide a field where you can put in a filter command to be put between the diff generator and the display parser.

Have you seen what dirdiff can do with displaying diffs? You can expose more context, move old and new lines up and down (but not in a manner which changes the meaning of the diff), and split context lines into old/new pairs, all with the mouse. This lets me rearrange a diff to make it more visually meaningful and understandable. I could import that stuff into gitk, since dirdiff is also written in Tcl/Tk.

Paul.