Re: Meld choose text filters based on file type ?

[Kai <kai willadsen gmail com>]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 03:15, Krolnik, Adam via meld-list <meld-list gnome org> wrote:
>
> Hi all;
>
> I've been using meld for several years - great tool.
> Today, I was merging code and found that meld missed 2 merges due to text filters.
>
> I had a text filter for assembly code files enabled that caused code lines with "!" to be ignored. Obviously this can apply to other codes where the wrong comment delimiter enabled can cause meld to ignore changes.
>
> So I was wondering if there could be a new feature to select text filters based on the type of the file ? Thus, my assembly text filter would only be enabled for files ending with the suffix I choose (.[sS]). Similarly, scripts would enable '#' as a comment filter. These may need to run file to determine that it is a script...

Something like this is a long-standing request (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld/-/issues/13).

I think it's definitely a reasonable feature, but needs work to figure out how to make the behaviour clear to the user. I also don't have any good idea what the UI would look like, which might be tricky. For the file type I would suggest that we can rely on gio's detection (though not 100% reliable, it should probably be Good Enough).

cheers,

Kai