Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: colored diffs [Was: [PATCH] parent selector 'p:xxx']

[Ralf S. Engelschall]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007, Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:

> On Oct 8, 2007, at 4:04 PM, Lapo Luchini wrote:
>
>> Lapo Luchini wrote:
>>> Derek Scherger wrote:
>>>>> (What's this diffc-0.3 thing?)
>>>> It's just some perl script that colorizes diffs in a way that seems to
>>>> look nice. It used to be available at http://download.gnu.org/diffc-0.3
>>>> but I can't seem to get there at the moment.
>>>
>>> Personally, I use FreeBSD's cdiff (both on FreeBSD and on Cygwin):
>>> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/textproc/cdiff/src/
>>
>> We could, in fact, add a --color option to "mtn diff" itself...
>
> There are, in fact, two entries in the ROADMAP about this that I added when
> using cogito in another project.  Cogito automatically pages output
> internally (if the output is directed to a terminal) and has an option to
> enable colored output for log and diff.  These two features were very nice,
> and hence why I put them in that file ;)

Just by coincidence last week I've developed a plugin-based new tool
(OSSP p2) which does for Monotone (and also other commands, just
according to available plugins) what you all requesting here.

If the output is larger than the number of terminal lines, OSSP p2
automatically pages the output, it colorized and even reformats parts of
the output, is able to redirect individual lines from stdout to stderr
or vice versa, passes though exit codes, correctly handles signals, etc.
It finally replaced a bunch of ad-hoc scripts I used since many many
years for post-processing and colorizing "cvs diff", "svn diff", "svn
log", etc.

Ok, OSSP p2 requires Perl and a few addon modules (for terminal
independent and not hard-coded coloring, etc), but this doesn't matter
very much at least for me ;-) If we insist on having no dependencies for
this type of stuff in Monotone, then we have to code this directly into
Monotone, of course. But I'm not sure whether it is worth the effort.
At least as OSSP p2 is a generic post-processing engine (which just
has also a "mtn" plugin), I'm personally also happy with a built-in
solution.

I append you three ad-hoc made screenshots from my current development
session where I today use Monotone (with enabled OSSP p2 for output
post-processing) to work on another OSSP tool. In case enough people
find this sort of stuff useful I can speed up a little bit in releasing
OSSP p2 (the engine and the first set of plugins are done and work fine
as you can see in the screenshots -- it just needs more documentation
and a little build environment, README, etc)...

                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       address@hidden
                                       www.engelschall.com

screenshot-mtn-misc.png
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screenshot-mtn-diff.png
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screenshot-mtn-log.png
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