Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Engineering beautiful software jon aquino labs | personal blog

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Meld: A good diff for OSX

Aside from the very expensive Araxis Merge, I think Meld is the best diff for OSX, at least for me, because:

  • It has the option to start with two blank textareas that you can paste text into.
  • It allows you to edit the textareas.
  • It gets the diff right almost all of the time.
  • It has optional line wrapping. Some other tools do not have this (such as Beyond Compare).
  • It can compare directories.
Check out this example of Sublimerge getting the diff wrong:
It fails to recognize that what is happening is that there were four removals. Meld gets it right:

Beyond Compare I just don't get. I know a lot of people praise it, but it seems buggy to me. For example, when I want to paste in the above example, I paste the code on the left:

And then to paste the code on the right, I click in the middle of the right textarea and press V, and now things are messed up:
So then I press ⌘A, ⌘V, thinking that will fix it, but it's still messed up:
Only when I press ⌘A, ⌘V on the left side are things finally fixed:
I don't know – there is something funny about the way Beyond Compare handles alignment. Like if the right side is blank, why is it letting me paste on different lines present on the left side, instead of pasting on the first line like a normal empty textarea?

I have also noticed that DeltaWalker gets diffs wrong too - I don't have an example at present, but will provide one when I can.





Friday, November 09, 2018

Slack: green z vs gray z

Today I learned the difference between the green z icon and the gray z icon in Slack:


From Slack support: "Green means they are currently online. The "z" indicates they have Do Not Disturb turned on which prevents notifications popping up on their screen."