Re: changes in meld 1.8 +

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On 5 July 2014 03:04, andré <andr55 laposte net> wrote:

Recently I upgraded my distro.
It now ships with meld 1.8.2, and I just tried using the new meld.
Unfortunately, numerous regressions.
(Note that I also tried versions 1.8.5 and 3.11.1 from the download page, which show the same regressions.)

1) The most important, the ability to hide lines in directory mode is lost.  This was an invaluable feature.  It allowed much more reliable working through numerous changes to large sets of files, particularly
for porting some changes across versions which will remain different.

Please note that the meld users manual » folder comparison » filtering, under "explicit hiding" and "case sensitivity" says that toolbar buttons are available for this purpose.
So maybe this was an accidental oversight ?

No, this was deliberately removed due to low usage (yes, I realise some people used it) and it's extremely unlikely to come back. While there's no timeline, the replacement for stuff like this will be to add a plugin system that allows custom actions for people that want very specific things.

 

2) The layout of the comparison page seems somewhat strange :
2a) The title of the tab is uselessly repeated.
2b) The large oversized icons take up a lot of screen space.  Small icons would be as useful, if any are wanted.

...but we have nothing *but* screen space on this tab. There is literally nothing else here, so it's not like we're wasting a valuable resource. The point of this tab is to be clear (particularly for new users) and functional.

 

2c) The entry of file/directory paths + names is limited to about 20 characters, grossly insufficient for many comparisons.  (Almost all in my usages.)

This could be made longer, but in 3.11.x it auto-expands to the longest name anyway.

 

 The older layout of file name fields one above the other was much more useful.

The left-to-right layout is deliberate, to indicate correspondence with where the files end up.

 

2d) Entering a second file/directory name does not take advantage of the previous name entered.

The file selectors remain in the location of the last selected file, so I'm not sure what you mean here.

 

 Also, an entered name can not be copied to another name field, very useful for paths that are very similar.

 

This is just the GTK file chooser widget... not much we can do about that. You can in fact

 

3) The changes are not localized.  Hopefully that will come soon.

You're using an old 1.8.x, so check the most recent for localisations. The Gnome translation team takes care of Meld translations, so you could always try to request support for Meld for your language if it's missing.

 

However there are some pluses, such as showing size + modification date, and allowing comparing only by name/size/date instead of each character.  Both very useful.

It is just that not being able to hide lines (the first point) is a huge disadvantage in analyzing 2 directory trees containing many hundreds of files.

I appreciate this is a problem for some projects, but in most cases this is what file filters are designed for.

 

A show-all button would be useful as well, making it easier to clean up file sets with backup files, etc

I don't understand what you mean here. What would the button do?

 

cheers,
Kai