gtkdiff 1.8.0

Development branch

Gtkdiff-1.x.0 (x > 0) is a development branch, headed for gtkdiff-2.0.0. If you want a stable version, please use gtkdiff-1.0.x (x > 0).

General Information

Gtkdiff is a GTK+(GNOME) diff(diff3) and merge tool.

Installation

See the file 'INSTALL' for instructions.

Copyright

GPL applies all portions of the code I wrote. Please see COPYING file.

Usage

To run, e.g.
$ gtkdiff [--geometry 800x600] [from-file(dir)] [to-file(dir)] $ gtkdiff [--geometry 800x600] [file1] [file2] [file3] $ gtkdiff [--geometry 800x600] [file1] [file2] [file3] [-o merge-output]

Then,
use menus (menu-bar and right-click menu). That is all you can do.

Note: If text-wrap is enabled, some navigations become slower and some features are missing. I suggest you to set text-wrap off as default, and enable it only when you need it. (ctrl-l might be useful after you enabled text-wrap.)
Note: If you feel gtkdiff is slow, please try to disable showing line numbers. It could improve the performance.

"gtkdiff-rcs" is a simple shell script that launches gtkdiff for RCS files. You can see its usage by seeing script itself, or output from $ gtkdiff-rcs --help
The implemented features are only what I need, so it might lack what you need. I think that gtkdiff-rcs will become obsolete, after a fancy RCS-frontend program appears.

"gtkdiff-cvs" is a simple shell script that lanuches gtkdiff for CVS files. Please do to know the usage.
$ gtkdiff-cvs --help

Features

It has two view modes, one-pane and multi-panes.
Support directory diff.
Easy navigations across different portions. (ctrl-n and ctrl-p are your friends)
diff3 support.
Interactive merge operation.

About merge operations

Keyboard navigation:
You can navigate the portions with ctrl-n(next) and ctrl-p(previous). Statusbar shows you which portions are chosen. (On startup, nothing is chosen. Do press ctrl-n.) Then, you can insert or remove them into merged text with ctrl-1(insert file1), ctrl-2(insert file2), ctrl-3(insert file3) ctrl-9(remove file1), ctrl-8(remove file2), and ctrl-7(remove file3).

Mouse navigation:
Click on the portion to select, and click again on it to insert it. To remove it, you need to use menus.

About GNOME

After gtkdiff-0.8.0, gtkdiff requires GNOME(gnome-libs). If you can't install GNOME to your machine, try gtkdiff-0.7.0. gtkdiff-0.7.0 is the last version that doesn't require GNOME. Although gtkdiff-0.7.0 will not be maintained, the basic features are almost implemented.
(Updated info.: gtkdiff-0.7.0 is getting more and more obsolete. I can't recommend you to use gtkdiff-0.7.0.)

About colors

You can sepcify the colors on text widget and overview widget by preference. Other colors are specified by rc file.
If you think it is a bad design, let me know.

On some environments(I guess it depends on 'theme'), you couldn't see slider on overview widget.
I think it happens because gtkdiff can't find its rc file. See the following section about rc file.

About rc file

The rc file is installed in $datadir/gtkdiff/gtkdiffrc, e.g. /usr/local/share/gtkdiff/gtkdiffrc.

Gtkdiff will search its rc file as following order, 1. ./.gtkdiffrc [current directory]
2. $HOME/.gtkdiffrc [home directory]
3. $datadir/gtkdiff/gtkdiffrc [system directory] Once a file found, gtkdiff doesn't continue searching other rc files.

The reason why gtkdiff reads its own rc file, is mainly to specify fixed-width fonts.
As a result, even if you set your default font as fontset, it's overridden. Therefore, if you want to see Japanese characters, you need to modify the rc file by yourself. (please omit the comment.)

Platform specific info

On RedHat6.0, you will see the following message,

Gtk-CRITICAL **: file gtkwidget.c: line 1592 (gtk_widget_map): assertion `GTK_WIDGET_VISIBLE (widget) == TRUE' failed.

This is a gtk+-1.2.3 library's problem. Please update it to gtk+-1.2.x (x >= 4), or ignore the message. Even on other systems, you may see it if you're using gtk+-1.2.3.

How to report bugs etc.

Please send e-mail to the following address. inoue@ainet.or.jp

If you put "gtkdiff" at the subject, it would help me.

URL

http://www.ainet.or.jp/~inoue/software/gtkdiff/index.html (Japanese) http://www.ainet.or.jp/~inoue/software/gtkdiff/index-e.html (English)