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Re: [platform-compare-dev] Compare Features... 
Hi Marco,


Well, seems like this is a pretty quiet mailing list... if there's
anybody actually listening,


I'm listening :-)



1. Scroll bars.  Right now, if you set the scrolling of the compare view
   to be synchronized, then you get a really nice link between the
   deltas in the right and left panes.  If you turn off synchronized
   scrolling, that goes away.  Is it possible to set it up so that when
   synchronized scrolling is turned off, the scrollbar for the left-hand
   pane is on the left, and that link indication remains?  It would make
   the compare *much* more flexible.


Well, it is possible. However SWT doesn't support scrollbars on the left, so
I would have some to use some tricks to get that right. I will think about it.



2. Synchronized scrolling option.  Instead of making it a preference on
   the preferences page, why not make it a toggle on the compare view?
   It could be in the line that has the "copy whole file right/left",
   "copy right/left" and "next/previous change" buttons.


I had that in an earlier incarnation of the Compare plugin. However my
experience was that users had it either always turned off or always turned on,
but that they typically didn't change it too ofter. So I decided to remove
it from the toolbar.
Would it be OK for you to have it in a context menu or toolbar dropdown menu
instead of a toolbar button?



3. Compare colour coding.  This might come at the cost of the source
   colour-coding, but if it's an option than that should be ok.  The
   colour coding would work so that, in addition to the current "these
   two lines are different", the changed text itself would be
   highlighted and the (customizable) colour used to highlight would
   indicate addition/deletion/modification...  (For an excellent example
   of this, look at Araxis Merge...  http://www.araxis.com )
Have you noticed that the text compare viewer supports word (or in the Java case token) based differencing? If you use the step buttons on the far right side of the 
the compare viewer's pane toolbar, you first select a range of differing lines.
If you press again, you step inside that range and you can step through differeing 
words or tokens.
In the old Swing-based version of the Compare viewer I was using background
colors to indicate word (and token) diffs within a range.
However I didn't like it too much because it was visually extremely noisy.
If I remember correctly in SWT you can only have a background color for a complete line, 
not a single word. An alternative would be to use foreground colors, but this
would definitively collide with syntax coloring (and may be would confuse some users). 


   Thanks for your time. :-)


Thanks for *your* time.

If you have some more time may be you can give me some feedback for my
posting "Compare/Merge/Patch Issues". I would like to know how Compare/Merge
functionality should be presented: as an editor, a viewer, a dialog,
or looseley coupled views and editors in a perspective.

Thanks,
--andre

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