Re: sdiff UI enhancement

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jun 6, 2007, at 2:10 AM, David Malone wrote:
> I use sdiff a fair bit, as it is used as part of FreeBSD's mergemaster
> script. I often notice that when I am merging left and right sections,
> I type "r" for left and "l" for right, because "l" is on the right
> hand side of the keyboard and "r" is on the left hand side of the
> keyboard.

Agreed.  It gets even worse if English isn't your native language--  
in French, for example, the words are "droit" and "gauche".

> I believe this is a known cognative problem for humans (if I remember
> right, it gets a mention in the O'Reilly "Mind Hacks" book). We're
> unlikely to be able to patch humans, so I thought it might be good
> to add an alias where "1" means left and "2" means right. On all
> the keyboards I've seen (including Hebrew keyboards) 1 is on the
> left and 2 is on the right.
>
> The following patch adds 1 and 2 as aliases for l and r - would it
> be possible to get something like this added to diffutils?

I wish you the best of luck getting your patch included.   
Regrettably, the diff maintainers weren't interested in a similar  
patch I wrote about three years ago, located here:

  http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/sdiff2.diff

This patch makes the choice of keys configurable via an environment  
variable, and also fixes the invocation of an external editor via the  
calleditor() routine if the user chooses to manually perform the merge.

> --- sdiff.c     Wed Jun  6 09:43:49 2007
> +++ sdiff.c.patched     Wed Jun  6 09:44:54 2007
> @@ -858,6 +858,8 @@
>  e:\tEdit a new version.\n\
>  l:\tUse the left version.\n\
>  r:\tUse the right version.\n\
> +1:\tUse the left version.\n\
> +2:\tUse the right version.\n\
>  s:\tSilently include common lines.\n\
>  v:\tVerbosely include common lines.\n\
>  q:\tQuit.\n\
> @@ -913,7 +915,7 @@
>           cmd0 = skip_white ();
>           switch (cmd0)
>             {
> -           case 'l': case 'r': case 's': case 'v': case 'q':
> +	    case '1': case '2': case 'l': case 'r': case 's': case 'v':  
> case 'q':
>               if (skip_white () != '\n')
>                 {
>                   give_help ();
> @@ -966,10 +968,12 @@
>        switch (cmd0)
>         {
>         case 'l':
> +       case '1':
>           lf_copy (left, llen, outfile);
>           lf_skip (right, rlen);
>           return 1;
>         case 'r':
> +       case '2':
>           lf_copy (right, rlen, outfile);
>           lf_skip (left, llen);
>           return 1;

--
-Chuck