Re: Heavily used program appreciated and wishings ...

[Kai Willadsen <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On Sat, 25 Aug 2018 at 12:23, NGAndMainAccess MELLOTT <melken tds net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am not familiar what the usual updating cycle for the mailing list downloads is.  The last one I noted is 
> in May.  I hope everyone is healthy.

I'm not certain what you mean by "mailing list downloads", but the
list archives are at https://mail.gnome.org/archives/meld-list/ and
should always be current.

> I use Meld quite often and consider it of great value.  One feature that might be nice though, would be to 
> have the option to have it display an inverted highlighted (perhaps deep red background) filler for missing 
> characters.  One might put a matching highlighted statement of its size (and purpose) when it is selected 
> for added clarity on the status line at the bottom of the main dialog window.

I'm not sure I totally understand what you're asking for here. Do you
mean that in the within-change highlighting, we would show characters
that existed on one side but not the other with a different background
colour? If so, that's an interesting idea but I'd be worried that it
would be very visually confusing.

Also, there's the problem of deciding whether a character is modified
vs. missing, which would then become another layer.

> The only other thing [and it is likely a big one] that may be helpful where files are to be (highly) equal 
> and differences need to be fixed; would be to use the full width of the display and use ~boxed~ areas 
> having a light off shade differing backgrounds for the lines that differ in the files.  The memory of the 
> differing cursor positions in each box is nice.

So an inline diff style rather than side-by-side? I'm not certain how
much work that would be, but probably quite a lot. However, I'm not
sure how much benefit Meld would be over a much simpler editor with an
inline-diff format.

cheers,
Kai