Make Diff listen to file-change-notifications and ask to reload
The Diff view/window in Plastic does not listen to filesystem notifications about file-changes when diffing a file in a workspace.
It should discover external changes to the workspace file and ask to reload/recalculate the diff when needed. Other Diff tools I have tried do this...
Göran Wallgren
shared this idea
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Göran Wallgren
commented
A minimal improvement would be to add a Refresh (icon) button in the Diff tab and inline Diff panel.
The Diff tab currently does not even listen to the F5 shortcut, so if the file is changed we have to close and reopen it. A Refresh button (with F5 shortcut) would be very useful here.
The inline Diff is refreshed on F5 but that is only since the whole tab is refreshed. To refresh only the current Diff we need to select another file/revision (in Pending Changes for example) and then select the first one again. A diff-specific Refresh/Recalc button would be useful here too, but F5 would still apply to the whole tab...
That said, I still think Plastic should notify the user whenever something has been changed on disk, similar to the notification about new changesets in the Pending Changes view. It can still be up to the user to perform the actual Refresh action, we just want to avoid missing the fact that we have to do it.
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Göran Wallgren
commented
You do this at the user's risk of losing changes... And you don't have to do the reload, immediately, just tell the user that there is a new version and ask the user if it should reload! This is how some other Diff tools handle this situation.
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It is an interesting suggestion, but I don't think we will implement it at this point. The entire GUI is (right now) built around the concept of the user refreshing stuff instead of Plastic doing clever things behind the scenes.
I personally hate tools that do things without being asked to do it, because they tend to end up killing your cpu or disk usage, or both.
