Comments on: Diffing Files to Avoid Easy Goofs

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 22 May 2011 18:18:00 +0000

Lots of great suggestions, covering git, Hg, and TFS. Thanks so much.

I’ve also found the “review before commit” workflow I was looking for with gitk (which was already installed, probably as part of installing git). It even supports “review before staging.” “gitk &” starts it in a separate thread, so that I can keep it open (refresh it with Ctrl-F5) and continue working. “gitk –all &” to view all branches.

By: Guest

Guest — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:52:00 +0000

Also if you’re using TFS, download the power tools and try the command ‘tfpt review’.

By: Nadav

Nadav — Wed, 18 May 2011 11:58:00 +0000

If only VS2010 would use a consistant ordering in it’s generated code files…
It’s very irritating to make a small change to a form (i.e. change the size of a label) and then when you view the diff you see 100 differences because VS2010 reordered the generated file :(

By: The Morning Brew - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #854

The Morning Brew - Chris Alcock » The Morning Brew #854 — Wed, 18 May 2011 07:38:51 +0000

[...] Diffing Files to Avoid Easy Goofs – Sharon Cichelli discusses a good developer practice – self reviewing your change set before committing to your Version Control System allowing you to identify mistakes, missing comments, etc. [...]

By: thomaslangston

thomaslangston — Wed, 18 May 2011 03:20:00 +0000

You get an inline diff tool on the commit window of TortoiseHg. This takes a bit of time to become accustomed to, but I use it for almost all commit proofreading today. I use Beyond Compare when I need to a side by side diff, particularly if I’m comparing entire directories.

TortoiseHg commit window screenshot
http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/img/vt_commit.png

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 18 May 2011 03:08:00 +0000

Beyond Compare is nice. You can also configure git and hg to use TortoiseMerge if you’re already familiar with the tool.

By: Guest

Guest — Wed, 18 May 2011 00:20:00 +0000

I use ‘git add -p’ to review and stage my changes incrementally.

By: Keith Dahlby

Keith Dahlby — Tue, 17 May 2011 23:28:00 +0000

In git you can configure a difftool (I use Beyond Compare) to do a visual diff. Usage is identical to diff. Note that this works best after you have committed, though to see changes in the index you can use “git difftool –staged”.