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The "Compare with" dialog
Contents
Abstract
The goal of this project is to provide a more flexible and user-friendly way to compare files inside the Eclipse environment. Currently, the Eclipse's "Compare With" feature has a few problems:
- There is no easy way to compare files located outside the workspace with ones located inside (see bug 73923 for details).
- To compare two or three files in the current workspace the user has to select them (using a ctrl-click) and choose the "Compare With"->"Each Other" option from a pop-up menu.
Both these issues can be solved by providing an UI element (possibly a dialog or a view) to which user can add two or three files and than invoke a compare editor from it.
This project is part of 2008 Google Summer of Code.
Participants:
- Student: Aleksandra Woźniak
- Mentor: Tomasz Zarna
Features (by priority)
Must have
- adding files for comparison by drag'n'dropping them from the Package Manager
- adding files for comparison by "Open Resource"/"Open Type" dialogs
- adding files for comparison by "Open file" dialog (for choosing files located outside the current workspace): 73923 (ASSIGNED)
- adding clipboard content for comparison
Should have
- invoking folder compares from the dialog
- clipboard content preview
- basic info about files selected for comparison, eg. filename, modification date, icon
- moving files/content between left, right and ancestor (either d'n'd or buttons)
- extension mechanism to support other "Items selection dialogs" like "Open Type"
- compare two opened files: 39125 (ASSIGNED)
Nice to have
- invoking a compare editor by drag'n'dropping one file to another in the Package Manager
- ancestor is an optional part of comparison so this section of the dialog could be expandable (should be hidden when no needed, and expanded/shown when the user would like to use ancestor in the comparison)
- don't make the dialog too busy, limit number of widgets to minimum
"One bug to block them all": 224562 (ASSIGNED)
Invoking the dialog
- from context menu in Package Manager?
- from context menu in editors
- by drag&dropping one file to another in Package Manager
Tasks: ... (related bugs will be listed here)
Adding content to the dialog
- drag&dropping from Package Manager
- by "Items selection dialog"
- from clipboard
Tasks: ...
- extendable ancestor section
- displaying basic info about files chosen for comparison (name, modification date, icon)
- moving files between left, right and ancestor section
Tasks: ...
Other tasks
...
Community proposals
Feel free to add your comments and ideas.
- Please also have a look at the "AnyEdit tools" plugin: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/anyedit/index.html
It also adds several enhancement to the selection of to be compared artifacts (like clipboard, opened editor...), so maybe you can benefit from the ideas or work over there.
- (copied from 73923)
- I'd really like to drag and drop files from Konqueror or another filesystem-browser.
- The dialog could be invoked via a rightclick on the editor tab (but as of bug #216710 the normal rightclickmenue will do)
- I second the request, to paste clipboard contents in a temp-file as another source. It should be possible, to first pass one portion of text, select the next text and create a second temp file before invoking the compare. Therefore the dialog should not be modal (but may or may not hover in front?).
- It might be worthwhile to rearrange the order of the files. If several files are dragged, it would be nice to sort them for last modification. But a manual reorder without the tedious copying of filenames around should be possible.
- Last, if there is too much time :-) I envision a feature like the formula-editor in spreadsheet-applications offer. A button to click, that reduces the whole dialog to a single line of textinput, that stays in front, to monitor, where the user clicked / which editor-.tab got the focus last / which entry of the package explorer was clicked.
- an idea of a dynamic context menu is mentioned in 198701 (ASSIGNED)