Enhancement Request: Custom regex filters in TortoiseMerge

Hi,

We do a lot of automated integration testing using large baseline text files. Occasionally a code change will require a single simple change to be applied to hundreds or even thousands of lines in multiple baseline files. We would like to make the review and check-in process for these baseline files more streamlined and less susceptible to "needle-in haystack" errors where we miss a glaring error among many lines of expected changes.

I'm imagining a feature which would support a workflow similar to the following:

1. Open 1-2 Commit dialogs. Your "session" has started.
2. Double-click on an item in the dialogs to start diffing and marking off items for check-in.
3. In TortoiseMerge, notice that there are thousands of similar changes in the files being compared.
4. In TortoiseMerge, expand a _NEW_ regular expression "ignore" window. By default, it might be blank or it might have regular expressions in place corresponding to your current whitespace-ignore preferences. (It might also have regular expressions to match code comments, if an "ignore comments" option were present.)
5. Add a regular expression to the ignore window and refresh. Suddenly you're down to a few hundred changes. Maybe the regex-filtered stuff is still apparent in the GUI, but easily skipped over.
6. Iterate until you are happy, then close* TortoiseMerge.
7. Continue working through the other files in your session, adjusting and tuning your regex filter set as you go.
8. Check in your work to complete your session.

*Being careful not to hit Esc twice... Doh!

That's the basic idea. There's some latitude. The other big use case I see for it is in code refactoring. I would be curious to know if it would be of value to others. I also have a number of thoughts about ways to persist and share regex filter libraries across users, checking default filter sets as text or XML files into SVN folders, for example.

Thanks, Eric

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Received on 2011-04-01 04:50:12 CEST