On Sep 18, 2014 5:46 AM, "Scott Kostyshak" <skostysh princeton edu> wrote:
>
> I really like the feature in Meld where you can put your mouse over
> the middle bar and scroll to navigate the differences. From what I
> understand, currently meld figures out what the "next" difference is
> based on the cursor position. I think this is reasonable, but I wonder
> if for most users' workflows it would make more sense to figure out
> the next difference based on the line that is closest to the mouse
> position when the user initiates the diff-scroll.
I think it might be a good idea to look at changing the behaviour, but I think it's hard to know what will work without trying a few things.
My guess is that going by current mouse position might be weird, and something along the lines of "whatever chunk the cursor is in, if the cursor is on the screen, otherwise the chunk nearest to the middle of the screen" might be closer. I'm flexible on the first of those conditions... but I think we need something like it. We have logic for keeping the scrolled-to chunk near the middle of the screen, so maybe link up with that?
Also, figuring out which chunk is nearest the middle of the screen (or the mouse cursor) will be a challenge as well, since you need to pick a side and handle inserts.
> For a use case, differences in my files are usually close together. So
> there will be ten or so differences with a few lines of
> non-differences in-between each of those ten; and then 200 lines later
> there will be a similar cluster; and so on. I look at the differences
> in the first cluster by navigating with normal scroll until I get to
> the end of the cluster. Then my instinct is to use "diff-scroll" to
> get to the next cluster, but because the mouse didn't move on normal
> scroll, Meld takes me up instead of down, to the second difference in
> the first cluster. All I need to do is remember to click before I
> diff-scroll and it does what I want. I have trouble remembering this
> though.
> I'm fine with a 'wontfix' on this, but just wanted to check-in to see
> if anyone else has thoughts. If this would be an OK feature request, I
> can open a ticket.
No, I've definitely done this before as well, so I'm very open to changing the way this works. However, the mapping from lines/pixels to chunks is some of our hairier code. (It probably shouldn't be, but... it is.)
Cheers,
Kai