Programmer's File Editor With Change Tracking? 286
passionfingers writes "My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually. Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (as a word processor does). I have scouted around online for such an animal, but to no avail — even commercial offerings like UltraEdit32 don't offer such a feature. Likewise on the OSS side of the fence, where I expected a Notepad++ plugin or the like, it appears that the requirements to a) open a file containing a large volume of text data and b) track changes to the data, are mutually exclusive. Does anyone in the Slashdot community already have such a beast in their menagerie? Perhaps there is there a commercial offering I've missed, or could someone possibly point me to their favorite (stable) OSS project that might measure up?"
diff -Nrau (Score:5, Informative)
CVS/SVN? (Score:5, Informative)
SCiTE [scintilla.org]
SCiTE for AutoIT [autoitscript.com] with screenshots
CVS/SVN wrapper for SCiTE [autoitscript.com] with screenshots and instructions
Jonah HEX
Re:Version control (Score:5, Informative)
Re:AskSlashdot: "Please Do My Work For Me" (Score:3, Informative)
He points out that he has had a look himself, but he doesn't seem to have heard of version tracking software, or cpmsoders it overly complex for their needs. Personally I've never used any myself, but it sounds about right for this type of task.
Um, Eclipse? (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to recall Eclipse saves your edit history
try SlickEdit (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Simple, switch to VMS! (Score:5, Informative)
If the users are using Linux, there is also ext3cow, which was discussed on /. (http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/0413253&from=rss), the newly announced Tux3 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/7/23/257), Wayback (http://wayback.sourceforge.net/) and others.
Emacs - ~/.saves directory (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That's not fair (Score:2, Informative)
They've become slightly more tricky about it now. It uses Javascript to hide all the comments so even the cached copy doesn't work. Unless you use NoScript of course :).
I'm not sure this would be a good idea but Google could offer a service where webmasters can register a key with their domains and then when the Google crawler comes along it could sign something with that key to ask for "protected" content. That way services you have to sign up for could still be indexed. Assuming you're willing to hand all your data over to Google of course, but nobody seems to have a problem with that at the moment.
Re:Real version control (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, it only appears to keep a full copy for the most recent versions, and repacking the repository ('git gc') will delta-encode everything as necessary. At least, that's how I understand the way it's described on the git wiki: http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/Git?highlight=(delta) [git.or.cz]|(compress)
Re:change the process (Score:3, Informative)
Sounds like they're in a non-sustainable environment. Once they run off the rails, or someone gets sick, or someone puts a comma where they shouldn't, the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
Risk management via creating space to improve the process is surely a better option than that, right?
Re:That's not fair (Score:3, Informative)
I've never had to turn off cookies or anything to view answers on Experts Exchange. Just scroll down past the masked answers and past all the categories: lo and behold, all of the answers are there in plain sight! This is the case for Firefox, at least.
Re:vi/emacs/eclipse/whatever + svn? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's not fair (Score:3, Informative)
They show up fine for me, just keep scrolling down. When I land on one of their pages from a google search, I see all of their gibberish posts but underneath all that, way down the page, I see the full text answers.
Re:That's not fair (Score:4, Informative)
Re:rent a geek (Score:3, Informative)
But that only works if the file format supports comments.
if you must: UltraEdit, WinMerge, KDiff3 (Score:1, Informative)
FIRST check if a different data representation may be more appropriate than those huge text files (e.g. split up into smaller files; or condense the data into a more compact representation; or put the data into a database with appropriate front end)
SECOND, if you stick with text files I second the common advice to consider a source control system like svn or Mercurial.
If you are still going with your head through the wall, WinMerge (winmerge.org) and KDiff3 (kdiff3.sourceforge.net) are handy and configurable tools. Their usefulness may depend on the data file structure and on the kind of changes applied.
Or take a second look at commercial UltraEdit which easily handles 300MB files and, iirc, DOES have a built-in diff feature.
Bernhard
Re:rent a geek (Score:3, Informative)
Storing version information in a complimentary file is the very basic description of what version control systems do.
Give your users an editor with WebDav support and make them edit the files directly in the SVN repository using a HTTP WebDav repository feature of SVN.