Hi again,
I am current integrating meld with the TortoiseHg mercurial client, of which I am one of the developers. We were already able to run meld on Linux but now that there is a nice Windows installer I'd like to be able to do so from windows as well. In doing so I've been using meld for a few days (I had not used it before because I normally use Windows), and I've noticed a few things that could make our integration a bit better.
In particular, we use "label" command line options to modify the title that meld shows when performing a diff in order to tell the user which file versions are being diffed. This works fine, and puts this information both on the meld window title and on the diff "tab". However this information is not very easy to see for two reasons:
1. The window title is transparent on Windows 7. Depending on the background it can be a bit hard to read.
2. The tab handles have a fixed size, and they do not expand with the tab label contents. This means that in general the text that is shown on the tab cut off, only showing part of the whole label. In most cases you can only see part of the label of the first file that is being diffed.
In addition, setting the label does not change the text of the file combobox. This is a pity because the combobox is big enough to show the label, and because it is where your eyes are naturally drawn when the meld window is open. It took me a little while to realize that I could see the labels on the meld window title.
So I'd like to propose a couple of possible improvements:
1. Let the tab size increase to fit the label
2. Show a "label" text on top or below of the file combobox, showing the label corresponding to the file. Alternatively, replace the actual file name with the label (this is what Ataxia Merge does and it works pretty well).
These labels are very important in the context of a version control tool such as TortoiseHg. They are essential to let the user know the versions they are working with. In this context the actual file names are often not very important because they are usually temporary files that are taken from history (e.g. to compare a certain file revision with the current working directory version).
So I think making these labels more visible is important. I believe any (or both) of my suggested changes would make using meld with TortoiseHg (and similar tools) nicer.
Cheers,
Angel