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Humans are set up to see differences visually when they see patterns. If the way that lines wrap depends on the width of your window, then it becomes hard to ma
by rlpb 13y ago
Humans are set up to see differences visually when they see patterns. If the way that lines wrap depends on the width of your window, then it becomes hard to match up the output visually from windows of different widths.
An example: I type "git diff" into one window, and look for some particular change area in my editor in a different window. If the wrap and alignments depend on the widths of my windows, then they won't match unless the widths of my windows also match. And if I have to make them match, then the original ideal of "make your window however wide you want and it'll just look right" is defeated.
- jlgreco 13y agoCan't say I experience this problem, the highlighting of relevant lines takes care of this. Human eyes are terrible at tracking across long lines of text without jumping up or down a line (this is why splitting text into columns is common in large books). On the other hand jumping between regions of color is easy. Furthermore, I don't think this is true: "And if I have to make them match, then the original ideal of "make your window however wide you want and it'll just look right" is defeated." Being able to resize both, with the constraint that they must both be kept in sync (which to be clear, I don't consider necessary), is better than the alternative: no effective resizing at all. You should probably look into integrating git-diff with your editor though (use git-difftool).