My text files are formatted with carriage returns at the end of paragraphs.
This means that a single line of text could have several hundred words. Most
other diff tools tell me that Old Paragraph is different from New Paragraph
and stop right there - they don't tell me where the two lines differ. This
is most vexing when the difference is a single space, or a single
punctuation point. The thing I love about meld is that it highlights the
actual words that are different, and doesn't just tell me that my 235 words
of text differ at some unspecified point in the line.
Of course, in my context, there are still some cases where the word-level
highlighting of meld is not as robust as it could be, but it works
surprisingly well - especially if its design didn't give much thought to
this particular context of use.
I'm including two screen captures to show you what I mean. In meld1.png, the
two highlighted paragraphs differ by a single comma. Meld points it out to
me, but fails to show me that the two lines are identical after the comma.
meld2.png, on the other hand, DOES show me that the lines are identical
after the single word of difference is accounted for. I realize that I'm
likely a complete outlier in your user community, but I'd love to see an
even more robust line differentiation algorithm that was better able to show
such in-line differences.