tkdiff Files

V 5.1             (11/11/2020):

• Complete overhaul of keyboard bindings provides user selection
  • adds a 4th preferences editing tab for personalization of same
• Expanded Bookmark facility including scrollability of items when
  • toolbar capacity is exceeded. Bookmarks may be individually
  • annotated and form the basis of a new item specific report format
• Additional report format and ability to view complexity statistics
  • without needing to generate an actual report
• Internal reengineering of Read-Only text display implementation
  • has restored keyboard-centric operation throughout the tool
• Network latency support is now restored to the MacOS platform
• General fault-tolerance throughout the tool has been increased
  • with greater use of onscreen messaging instead of aborting.
• Monochrome support has been discontinued (most features unusable).
• Specific Ticket resolutions addressed:
  • (73) Crash caused from inadvertent mispelling of command
  • (74) Crash from scrolling prior to first hunk w/autoselect = on.
  • Further, autoselect now operates passively when actively
  • scrolling (will no longer trigger autocenter if active)
  • (75) a syntactic repair to prevent a Crash when chosing either
  • of the L/R or R/L merge choices
• Other anomalies resolved:
  • Repaired a data-dependant corner case which could either Crash or
  • result in incomplete highlighting of 3way Diff ancestral markers
  • Resizing the main window smaller now operates properly; had been
  • only allowing approximately 40% reduction.
  • Minor fix (toolwide) prevents wrong subwindows from squeezing shut
  • prematurely during resizing to a smaller size.
  • Auxilliary windows (dialogs) now generally retain their prior
  • positions when re-appearing after the user has moved them.
  • Tooltip windows on MacOS will never again display UNDER others.
• Specific internal infrastructure modifications have produced a
• considerable level of uniformity and reliability throughout.
• Special case workaround (re: multiple display monitors)
  • Operations involving screen-edge clipping avoidance are presently
  • flawed under TK. Until a better solution can be found, edge
  • avoidance for windows appearing on secondary displays will be to
  • their main window and not the screen edge. This generally affects
  • Tooltips and combobox dropdown lists.
• As always, builtin Help is updated to cover ALL change aspects
  • it is recommended to read at least the process for bind editting

While the big new feature - user specifiable keyboard bindings - has long been on the grocery list, its ability to be implemented only became possible once several long-standing internal design choices could be re-engineered, without sacrificing TkDiffs speed, simplicity, stability and versatility. Originally planned for V5.0, it became necessary to delay it until now, for reasons too convoluted to explain here. Nevertheless it exists now, as does a renewed ability to operate the tool more directly from the keyboard, not that you must do so.

The enhancements to the Bookmarking facility may seem inconsequential but can help in organizing the more complicated merge cases where referring to multiple places, multiple times to understand the best approach to a given merge can be daunting. The tie-in to the reporting facility lets you see, in a concise fashion, just the regions needed for any given situation.

Beyond those, the remainder of the release was targetted to take advantage of the base provided by the prior version to standardize much of the internal infrastructure. Using techniques that ensure uniformity within the tool, the "random error" nature of many past problems will be much easier to now avoid, yielding much greater stability. And indeed, nearly a half dozen of simple changes (now possible to see) has eliminated considerable processing time for work that was needlessly being redone, over and over.

We invite any one seeking deeper insight into how the tool now functions to inquire at the TkDiff Discussion forum: https://sourceforge.net/p/tkdiff/discussion

The provided zipfile will unzip to its own subdirectory named "tkdiff-5-1" containing a README.txt file (having installation instructions), a Changelog file to highlight current (and past) modifications, the actual tkdiff Tcl script, and the (required) copy of the GNU License. We hope you find this new version both useful and reliable. Feel free to leave reviews, trouble tickets, new ideas; whatever you would like.