Coming Up In Version 16

[psguru]

This topic will be a place to announce and discuss new features coming up in ExamDiff Pro 16.

[psguru]

Improved Clipboard Comparison Support

ExamDiff Pro 16 will introduce the ability to select clipboard snippets to compare from your clipboard history, enabling you to compare files against clipboard snippets you've taken in the past and even compare multiple clipboard snippets against each other.
To select a clipboard item for comparison, click the drop-down button next to the Clipboard button in the Compare Files pane of the Compare dialog (clicking the Clipboard button itself will select the most recent clipboard item, just like it does today):

clip_history1_orig.png (47.63 KiB) Viewed 5955 times

You'll see a list of up to 25 of the most recent entries in your clipboard (less if your clipboard history was cleared recently). Each item shows a sample of its contents and the time that it was added to the clipboard. Hover over an item to see a tooltip with a longer preview of the clipboard item's contents:

clip_history2_orig.png (14.53 KiB) Viewed 5955 times

After you've selected a clipboard item, it will be shown as "[Clipboard Contents]" followed by its size (in number of characters) in the Compare dialog:

clip_history3_orig.png (26.74 KiB) Viewed 5955 times

Note that this feature requires Windows 10 or later. Earlier versions of Windows will only support the current clipboard-comparison behavior, where you can compare only the most recent item in your clipboard.

For more details see https://blog.prestosoft.com/2024/11/exa ... board.html

[psguru]

New Document Types and Improved Syntax Highlighting

Over the past few versions of ExamDiff Pro, we have been improving our handling of document types using the open-source Tree-sitter parsing library. In ExamDiff Pro 13, we introduced the scope bar, which provides a handy visual indicator of where you are in the structure of a file. Starting in ExamDiff Pro 14, the same scopes now make the comparison itself more accurate, with the Match file structures for comparison option.

In ExamDiff Pro 16, we build on this past work and give it a splash of color, by using the Tree-sitter parser for syntax highlighting. This is a huge improvement over the syntax highlighting that we have supported in the past: by parsing the whole file, we're now able to separate out language features like functions, types, and properties.

Here's an example of what a comparison session with C++ files looked like in version 15:

syntax4_orig.png (141.41 KiB) Viewed 5954 times

And these are the same files in version 16:

syntax1_orig.png (149.13 KiB) Viewed 5954 times

This new Tree-sitter-based syntax highlighting engine (which we now call "advanced syntax highlighting") is supported for all existing document types in ExamDiff Pro, except Basic, Batch, and Lisp. These three document types will still use "basic syntax highlighting" instead.

We have developed two color palettes for advanced syntax highlighting, one for EamDiff Pro's light theme and one for the dark theme. You can also customize the colors yourself in the new Options | Display | Syntax Color panel (note that the colors in this Options panel will depend on whether you are using ExamDiff Pro with a light or dark theme):

syntax3_orig.png (55.69 KiB) Viewed 5954 times

But wait, there's more!

In addition to improving our syntax highlighting support for existing document types, we're also adding 9 brand-new document types in ExamDiff Pro 16: Dart, Go, INI, Lua, Markdown, MATLAB, Rust, Verilog, and YAML.

You can see our new and improved Options | Document Types panel below. Note that it now shows more built-in document types than before, and also that each document type now indicates exactly which type-specific features it supports (as I've mentioned before, "advanced syntax highlighting" means that the document type uses the Tree-sitter parser for syntax highlighting):

syntax2_orig.png (83.07 KiB) Viewed 5954 times

For more details see https://blog.prestosoft.com/2024/11/exa ... s-and.html

[psguru]

A couple more new self-explanatory features coming in version 16:

Option to include line counts of added/deleted files in # of diffs in directory comparison

AddedDeletedLines1.png (71.98 KiB) Viewed 1721 times

AddedDeletedLines2.png (199.96 KiB) Viewed 1721 times

Ability to uninstall previous versions during setup

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