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I'd feel so much more motivation for checking out alternative diff tools if there was a better story for integrating them with the review tools in Github, GitLa
by mikepurvis 5y ago
I'd feel so much more motivation for checking out alternative diff tools if there was a better story for integrating them with the review tools in Github, GitLab, etc. I know there's nothing anyone can do about that— it's something the Git hosts themselves have to enable, or I have to see enough benefit in it to go to an dedicated review tool to make the bother of that worthwhile.
I believe Gerrit has a pluggable diff— is there anything more broadly on improving this story?
- Wilfred 5y agoDefinitely! I still look at diffs in the terminal pretty often, but all my code reviews are in rendered HTML. That said, there needs to be a credible tool before review tools can adopt it! GitHub does a line-based diff with word-based highlighting, which is probably the best you can do without syntactic smarts.
- mikepurvis 5y agoIt would be neat if there was a way to supply a "diff hint" or something right in your git commit metadata. Obviously the receiver/reviewer/renderer can ultimately do whatever they want, but it would helpful if I as the one preparing the change could at least specify intent. I guess projects like the kernel where the review system is built around emailed patches kind of already get this for free— once committed, the change will be rendered according to the local user's git settings, but during the review itself, it will be a diff prepared by the change's author that will be under discussion. In a glorious future where GitLab has four different diff options, it would be great if I could specify that I want it to default to the hinted diff tool, falling back to my preferred one if there is no hint.