The topic of today sounds pretty technical, but it is one that has a great impact on your work, if you are a developer using Git. This post outlines two fundamentally different methods for examining Git changes with Kaleidoscope. An appendix illustrates how to combine your Git app of choice with either method.
Recently, we have spent a lot of time on many aspects of the folder comparison feature for Kaleidoscope 4.4 and 4.5. We have overhauled some of the underpinnings and worked hard to improve reliability and speed. But we also added some major new features. It’s time to tell you a bit what they are and how you can benefit from those changes.
For the previous two feature releases, Kaleidoscope gained the ability to talk to git for the Git File History and the Merge Context Shelf. We now took some time to refine and add smaller bits, to increase your productivity and make Kaleidoscope more fun.
In this second of our series about the Kaleidoscope File Shelf we will look at how to deal with content coming from the clipboard, from integrations such as the ksdiff tool, or from Git.
You might never have noticed that Kaleidoscope has a thing called File Shelf. In this two-part series, we’ll show how you can use it, including some advanced examples.
Part 1 explains how to conquer multi-file comparisons using the File Shelf and the Navigation menu.
The new Git File History feature is extremely useful to quickly inspect changes to a file over time. You may find yourself in a situation where a file in your Git repository has been changed…
With the first major update to Kaleidoscope 4, we are entering completely new territory: Kaleidoscope can now directly talk to Git. While Kaleidoscope could always integrate with Git, until now it could only show the results of a Git operation, such as git difftool and git mergetool, which was typically initiated through a Git client like Tower. For the 4.1 update, we decided to focus on the ability to display and compare multiple revisions of a file.
Kaleidoscope 4 comes with an entirely new companion app called Kaleidoscope Prism. By default, it launches along with Kaleidoscope and remains running, so you may have noticed a new icon sitting quietly in your menu bar. Kaleidoscope Prism can change the way you work, with new options for starting and adding to comparisons, even if Kaleidoscope isn’t currently open.
Quite a few users over the years have told us they need to be able to add new text into comparisons. Kaleidoscope 4 adds that ability by allowing you to convert any comparison into a merge that can be edited.
Text filters reduce visual noise in a text comparison, noise that distracts from the differences you do care about. They are useful in a lot of scenarios, in particular when dealing with generated text like logs or files that contain “random” data, like timestamps or identifiers.