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.
After months of hard work, we are very proud to release Kaleidoscope 4 to the world! We are so much looking forward to people using it. We have been running various iterations of the new version for a long time now, and we are very happy how it turned out. We sure hope you will be, too!
While working on Kaleidoscope 4, we came up with some new design variations based on the Kaleidoscope icon shape. We really dig the look and want to share a collection of new wallpapers for your devices. They all come in light and dark variants to match your preferred appearance.
The arrival of ChatGPT has opened a lot of interesting avenues for using artificial intelligence to assist in the composition of all manner of text. In its current state, it generates results that can help us with our projects, but these results need to be reviewed closely. Kaleidoscope helps you spot the differences quickly and makes it easy to polish the AI’s work.
Very soon, we will be announcing Kaleidoscope 4 with many exciting new features. But before we share details about the new version, we want to make it clear how the subscription pricing will affect our existing customers.
A common workflow in Git is to use feature branches, where work is focused on one specific task. The Changeset functionality in Kaleidoscope helps you see exactly what has been done in a feature branch.
There are a number of valid reasons why you might want to compare files as binary data. As a developer, you may want to check aspects of an executable down to the bit-level detail. Also, files that look identical in Kaleidoscope might not be identical on disk. That’s where the fun starts…