GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 677360
Provide tooltip summarising file/folder metadata differences
Last modified: 2017-12-13 19:00:47 UTC
Wishlist item: I am comparing two directories with sets of files that have identical contents. One side of Meld shows all the icons of folders and files with little stars on them. When I compare the files, they are identical. But I have no way of knowing what that star means. I understand that across different platforms and color choices there might be different meanings for the different color-codings and icons. So, what if I hovered the mouse over the file or directory, or if I right-clicked it, and a quick summary of the reason for their differences (or similarities) was given. For example, if the files are the same contents but have different meta-data (like modification time or something), then it might say "This file has the same contents as its matched one. This file has been modified more recently than the other one."
The mark means that the file/directory is more recently modified. This *is* actually documented, but it's pretty bad that you'd have to go look that up. Ignoring the issue of the meaning of marks (there's an open bug request to provide a legend for comparisons), I do like the idea of having a way to get a plain language description of the differences. I'm not sure this should be triggered (hover sounds fine, but would have to see how it worked in practice), but it's a nice idea.
Having experimented with the written-language summary, I'm not convinced it's a good idea. However, I *have* prototyped a tooltip with a table-style display and some simple comparison indicators, and this seems pretty okay to me. I'm updating the summary to reflect what I think we should actually do about this.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld/issues/45.