Re: Understanding and improving --word-diff

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Nov 10, 2010, 00:05 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.1.00.1011100102540.2226@bonsai2>
In-Reply-To: <20101109220136.GA5617@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Hi,

On Tue, 9 Nov 2010, Jeff King wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 04:16:01PM +0100, Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
> 
> > E.g., I would like to see:
> > 
> > -a <r>b</r> c
> > +a <g>x</g> c
> > 
> > Unfortunately, all --word-diff types currently departs from line-based 
> > - and + lines and show the new version of the file with the changed 
> > words (both old and new versions) shown inline, marked with coloring 
> > or {- ...  -} kind of syntax. E.g., with --word-diff=color, the above 
> > would look like:
> > 
> > a <r>b</r><g>x</g> c
> > 
> > Personally, I think that the first example above is easier to read 
> > than the second one (at least for diffs of code).
> 
> Yeah, as you figured out, word diff is really about formats that aren't 
> line oriented.

Not really correct. While the _current_ way to show word diffs is imitating GNU wdiff, the internal data structure does allow for more sophisticated output.

Ciao, Dscho

P.S.: Peff, I hope you're fine with me responding to the first sentence only. After all, you know that my attention span is 7.2 seconds.

Some people taught me to put a smiley after such a statement, so: ;-)