Re: Meld ideas

[Stephen Kennedy <stevek gnome org>]

> Some other things which would be nice (could be duplicate requests with
> what others have asked):

Hi Carl, thanks for the feedback. I agree with all your points and even
tried to implement most of them, but failed for one reason or another.

> 1. Highlighing arrows when mouse-over.

I originally wanted them to be actual buttons so they would match the
theme have tooltips etc. The plan was to move them inside a gtkfixed
layout, but moving the buttons during scrolling was prohibitively slow.
I don't think gtk likes widgets to be moved around a lot.

> 2. Where lines are to be inserted, don't draw the cris-cross
> rubber-lines, taiper them to a point and draw a line though where the
> inserted text will appear. This will help as with long lines its
> sometimes hard to see which line the insertion will happen on.

I assume you mean draw a line across the text view? Tried that too, but
the textview draws in its own thread and there doesn't seem to be a way
to do this (short of a custom text view). The other option is to embed
some kind of widget in the text, but I think thats a nightmare for
several reasons mostly to do with editing.

> 3. The center line in the middle could be greyed when the "green etc"
> diff area covers it. It gets in the way.

I may just remove it altogether. It was supposed to show the "pivot" of
the rubber-lines, but maybe it's superfluous.

> 4. highlight the lines to the end of page, not end of line (so you get
> solid blocks)

Another gtktext issue. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81045

> 5.keep an extra thin white space on the left and right of the center
> column and put the arrow/delete boxes etc there. sometimes with large
> changes, the arrows point into the green rubber band of a previous/next
> diff. Another option is to overlay the buttons on the text, but only
> when you mouse-over so they don't always cover text.

Another gtktext issue. You can't easily put things in the margins. The
docs were quite clear that it was not quite usable. That was over a year
ago so things may have changed now. I think the ideal would be to have
them overlay the text at the margin like araxis merge does it, but I
don't know if that's possible either.

If anybody out there wants to send me a proof of concept demo of any of
the above, I'd be more than happy to integrate it into meld. :)

Regards,
Stephen.
-- 
Stephen Kennedy <stevek gnome org>
http://meld.sf.net visual diff and merge