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Bug 48845

Summary: Enhancing the compare view usability
Product: [Eclipse Project] Platform Reporter: Marcelo Paternostro <marcelop>
Component: CompareAssignee: Platform-Compare-Inbox <platform-compare-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P3    
Version: 3.0   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Marcelo Paternostro CLA 2003-12-16 09:47:32 EST 
Eclipse is now a very powerful tool with lots of different plugins.  I was 
able to find a plugin to develop any code I have to (C++, Java, Perl, Ant and 
so).  Today I can say that I almost don't have to leave the Eclipse IDE during 
a development day.

The times I do leave the IDE, I am usually comparing files.  The Eclipse 
comparison capabilities are excellent but I think the view would have great 
benefit from a couple of small improvements.  The major problem for me is 
that, although it is very easy to visually identify which lines or sections 
are different, it is really hard to identify which words are different given 2 
lines (even worse if the difference is a singe letter).  This is even worse in 
a small resolution (800x600) if the difference between the lines is at the end 
of the sentence.  So here the improvements I would suggest:

1. Common horizontal scroll:  the view should have a horizontal scroll bar 
that would move both panes at the same time.

2. Add 2 extra lines at the bottom of the view.  The top line would show the 
line selected on the left panel and the bottom line would show the line select 
on the right panel.  The difference between the lines would be presented in a 
different colour.

Btw, I have already requested feature 1 more than 2 years ago 
(https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=2278).
Comment 1 Andre Weinand CLA 2003-12-16 10:17:45 EST 
Do you know that you can step inside a diff range to see token based diffs?
If you use the up and down arrow buttons at the top of the pane they will first select the diff range 
and then step inside. In this case the differing tokens are revealed horizontally, so that this is some 
form of horizontal scrolling.
Comment 2 Marcelo Paternostro CLA 2003-12-16 10:40:45 EST 
Thx for the tip.  This will help a lot.  Althought I think we still have space 
for the features I've mentioned.

One of scenario that the "step into" function available doesn't help that much 
is when you want to have a good view of the different lines in order to figure 
out what is the correct one - very common scenario when doing CVS merges.
Comment 3 Andre Weinand CLA 2004-06-04 08:52:42 EDT 
Problem #1 has been addressed.

My comment  #1 addresses problem #2.

The remaining problem of getting an overview of the changes between two lines is addressed in 
#54822.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 54822 ***