I use TortoiseMerge for doing file comparisons a lot. I think I have
meagre needs but have a few suggestions/questions, mainly with regard to
searching. BTW I would be quite prepared to implement these myself if
it can be confirmed that they are a good idea and not inimical to the
basic design of the software.
1. More search options would be useful, particularly "Whole Word", which
I use a lot. (I also use pattern searches and backward searches
occasionally too.)
2. When end of file is reached it just shows nothing. This is
confusing. Either display a message or wrap around and display the
first occurrence from the top of the file again (with perhaps a message
in the status bar a la Visual Studio).
3. It would be really nice to have a history of recent searches in a
drop-down list.
4. It's pretty confusing where a search starts from. It seems to start
from the last found occurrence but sometimes restarts from the top of
file. There also seems to be no way to force it to start from the
beginning again (not even modifying the search text in the dialog and
leaving it the same!).
A better way would be to start the search from the currently selected
line. That way the user has control and is not forced to wade through
many occurrences they are not interested in.
5. I have been tricked by the fact that only one occurrence of search
text is found per line.
6. When copying the selected line(s) to the clipboard an "end of line"
should be added to the last line. Several times I have pasted and not
noticed that an existing line is left sitting on the end of the last
pasted line. This is usually noticed later but could nasty problems.
7. Many of the above changes would be assisted if partial lines could be
selected (with the mouse or keyboard), just like in Blame. This may be
hard as I suspect some sort of line-oriented, not character-oriented
control is being used to display the text.
This would allow searches and clipboard commands to work just like in a
text editor - behaviour that people are already very familiar with.
8. The one thing I would find incredibly useful would be to be able to
search for the next occurrence of selected text (as in Ctrl+F3 in Visual
Studio). That is, use the mouse to select some text and press Ctrl+F3
to find the next occurrence of it.
9. Although I rarely use it other "diff" tools I have used support
printing and also switching between vertical/horizontal split.
Finally, is there any reason the source code requires VS2005? I have
many versions of MS compilers going back to 1984 but the latest I have
is VS2003. I don't think there is much extra in the C++ language or
run-time that would make VS2005 a necessity. (There may be other
benefits, of course, but these should not preclude building with
VS2003.)
Regards,
Andrew.
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andrew@hexedit.com www.hexedit.com
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Received on Tue Aug 8 05:26:29 2006