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I would like to see support for an external diff program. Selecting of the files, etc., would work exactly as it does now, but we'd have a preference setting to select a third-party diff tool. Something like Wincvs is what I have in mind.

I've been thinking about this some, and I think the real issue is you can't send two files to a tool as arguments. If you could select two docs and pass those as arguments, you could set up a third-party diff as a user-defined tool with no extra support needed from Textpad. This would also allow you to set up an XML parser for quick transformations. I'm sure there would be other uses, as well.

See Cool Tools to use with TextPad - Visual File Compare .. for a very good 3rd party app, plus a method for sending more than one filename to a tool.

Thanks, but what I had in mind was being able to select two files from the document selector and running the diff w/o having to paste the file name into a parameter. That had already occurred to me, but it's a pita.

I think this is a good idea. It'd also be helpful to also have some additional ways to do this. For example, if there are only two documents open, then automatically send them as parameters to the external tool, without having to select anything in the document selector.

An excellent text comparsion tool is WinMerge. It is an open-source project hosted on SourceForege. It is a very active project and RC2 for version 2.0 has just been released.

WinMerge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/winmerge

A visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms. Useful for determing what has changed between project versions, and then merging changes between versions

It would be great to be able to "transparently" replace the diff engine with an outside program. (I.e. all would behave the same, but the results would either be displayed in the other application - my preference - or downloaded back from it into the results window)

This would require being able to "specify" two documents as arguments for the outside program of course. I myself would use "BeyondCompare" as the outside application.

daveqr wrote:I've been thinking about this some, and I think the real issue is you can't send two files to a tool as arguments. If you could select two docs and pass those as arguments, you could set up a third-party diff as a user-defined tool with no extra support needed from Textpad. This would also allow you to set up an XML parser for quick transformations. I'm sure there would be other uses, as well.

Why can't you pass two files as arguments? What about the old DOS FC? You had to pass two files for it to compare.

This would be a great timesaver if Textpad simple took the two selected files in the Document Selector and entered their paths into the compare dialog box!

could somebody tell me, wether it is possible to turn two filenames over to an external program like examdiff?
if it is not possible i must change to ultraedit. it can handle with it.
chris