On 20 March 2013 20:40, Angel Ezquerra <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 10:13 PM, Kai Willadsen <[email protected]> > wrote: >> There's no way around this, and I'd rather not add more command line >> options if we don't have to. I've seen this dealt with on Gnome + >> Nautilus by having an extension that allows you to queue up items for >> comparison. See for example: >> >> http://my.opera.com/bachkhois/blog/2011/07/19/compare-files-with-meld-from-within-nautilus > > That is similar to what Araxis Merge does and it works very well. The > drawback is that, as you said, it requires to write an explorer > extension.
Right, but the drawback for doing anything else is that I have to write and maintain the code and ABI forever more. And in the end, the result will still be significantly less useful than an explorer extension. >> I have no idea what the limitations of the Windows 'Send To' command >> or explorer extensions are. Would it be possible to have some kind of >> similar queuing implementation there? > > The nice thing about the "Send to" menu is its simplicity. You simply > add a shortcut to your executable in the "SendTo" directory (which is > in "%userprofile%\SendTo" in WindowsXP and in > "%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo" in Windows 7) and the shortcut > appears in your Windows Explorer context menu. > > When you right click on a file and select a SendTo entry it will > simply execute the program that the shortcut points to and pass the > name of the file as its only parameter. If you need more parameters > you can set them on the shortcut itself. > > So with a SendTo shortcut you can only pass one or more files or > directories, and they must be on the same directory because you cannot > select files or directories from different directories using Windows > Explorer. So it's identical to having multiple open commands? In that case why not just make an open command that does what you want? >> Either way, the problem is that giving Meld a single directory is >> inherently ambiguous. You'd have to have "Send To -> Meld as folder >> comparison" and "Send To -> Meld as VC comparison" entries, which >> seems like overkill to me. > > I think this is precisely a very good reason why I think melds needs > to let the user tell it what to do. Since the operation is ambiguous, > meld should not have to guess. Currently it always "guesses" that the > user wants to do a VC comparison, which is not useful if you do not > want to use the VC functionality of meld (as in my case). Unfortunately, that's because you're trying to do something that's a very minor use case. Meld's VC functionality is the *most common way* that comparisons are launched with Meld (other than direct invocations, or VC-initiated merges). > Another use case for being able to open a diff with a single file is > when you want to compare a file with some text that you want to write > or perhaps when you want to compare a file with what you have on the > clipboard. Sometimes you may want to compare two parts of a file using > copy/paste, for example. This is something that I often do, and which > is easy to do with many diff tools (e.g. araxis, WinMerge) but is not > possible (or not easy) with meld. I don't see how your proposal would help with that at all. We already support starting blank comparisons for files; for folder comparisons we sort-of do, but the fallback for missing directories means that it doesn't necessarily do what you'd expect. > So I think it would be great to have a way to tell meld to open "an > empty comparison" or to diff a single file with an "empty file" that > you may edit yourself (by typing, using copy paste, etc). You can already do this. You can start a comparison with only one entry by just passing a second empty entry, e.g., meld directory/whatever "" > It seems > that this would require an extra command line option, but in this case > it seems that there would be a good reason to do so. I really don't see what you would expect to happen in this case that is a significant improvement in terms of work flow. Maybe you could give an example of what the user would see? cheers, Kai _______________________________________________ meld-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/meld-list
