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

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 13, 2007, 15:16 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0704130812390.28042@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <17951.6252.457936.428919@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Paul Mackerras wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

>
> 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).

Ok, just a radio button for the patch case for "show patch" vs "show result" would certainly be sufficient for what I normally do. Adding the case "show origin" for completeness (ie filter out the new lines, rather than filtering out the old lines) is probably a good idea, even if I've never used it.

> Side-by-side would be more challenging.

Not a biggie. I've used kdiff3 etc in the past, and they do a good job of it and it "looks cool", but I've never done it on a command line which means that in practice _I_ don't use it. Maybe other people do.

> 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.

I've never used dirdiff. Sounds a bit like what kdiff3 does.

			Linus