Re[2]: [platform-compare-dev] Compare Features...

[Marco Qualizza <mqualizza@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thursday, December 13, 2001, 4:09:52 PM, you wrote:


> Hi Marco,

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

> I'm listening :-)

woohoo! :-)

>>
>>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
>>    ...

> 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.

Oh, I wasn't aware of that limitation.  *grin* Who do I bug to change
SWT? ;-)

>>
>>2. Synchronized scrolling option.  Instead of making it a preference on
>>    the preferences page, why not make it a toggle on the compare view?
>>    ...

> 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?

I honestly believe that it would be best as the toggle, but it doesn't
seem like having it on the context menu would feel too awkward.  The
only two real objections I have it to being on the context menu are
  1. As far as I can tell, it would be the only context-menu item used
     to save a state like this in the entire app.
  2. It *is* a toggle-able state, and it's state should be quickly
     viewable like the toggles in the Outline and Hierarchy views.

>>
>>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
>>    ...

> 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.

I didn't realize it did that.  After playing with it, tho', I decided
that it's not really what I want...  the problem is that it requires me
to sit there and manually click-through in order to see the specific
differences, which isn't nearly as useful as being able to scan the text
and see the changes.  In fact, I'd even go as far as to say that I'd use
this option (clicking through) only if I'm *really* stuck when it comes
to trying to tell what the specific changes are.  I think the idea is
great, I just don't think the current incarnation is suitable for
a situation where the desire is to gain information as quickly as
possible.

> 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.

Yes, background colours would be.  That's why I was hesitant to mention
it...

> 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).

*nod* The approach could be to add the foreground colouring as an
option, with the caveat that turning on foreground colouring would
remove all other (syntax-based) colour and use only the diff colours...
(*grin* and I'll warn you that there'll be cries to turn this into a
toggle on the view itself, too... ;-)  Sometimes I'll want to look at
the java, sometimes I'll want to look at the text... :-) )

>>    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.

Darned email lists. :-)  Went to the archive and managed to find the
message, I'll read it tonight, stew, and respond tomorrow.

-- 
Marco Qualizza

   1. The total sum of human intellect is a Universal Constant.
   2. The Earth's population keeps on increasing.

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