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  • Johannes Schindelin's avatar
    range-diff: use dim/bold cues to improve dual color mode · a7be92ac
    Johannes Schindelin authored and Junio C Hamano's avatar Junio C Hamano committed
    
    
    It *is* a confusing thing to look at a diff of diffs. All too easy is it
    to mix up whether the -/+ markers refer to the "inner" or the "outer"
    diff, i.e. whether a `+` indicates that a line was added by either the
    old or the new diff (or both), or whether the new diff does something
    different than the old diff.
    
    To make things easier to process for normal developers, we introduced
    the dual color mode which colors the lines according to the commit diff,
    i.e. lines that are added by a commit (whether old, new, or both) are
    colored in green. In non-dual color mode, the lines would be colored
    according to the outer diff: if the old commit added a line, it would be
    colored red (because that line addition is only present in the first
    commit range that was specified on the command-line, i.e. the "old"
    commit, but not in the second commit range, i.e. the "new" commit).
    
    However, this dual color mode is still not making things clear enough,
    as we are looking at two levels of diffs, and we still only pick a color
    according to *one* of them (the outer diff marker is colored
    differently, of course, but in particular with deep indentation, it is
    easy to lose track of that outer diff marker's background color).
    
    Therefore, let's add another dimension to the mix. Still use
    green/red/normal according to the commit diffs, but now also dim the
    lines that were only in the old commit, and use bold face for the lines
    that are only in the new commit.
    
    That way, it is much easier not to lose track of, say, when we are
    looking at a line that was added in the previous iteration of a patch
    series but the new iteration adds a slightly different version: the
    obsolete change will be dimmed, the current version of the patch will be
    bold.
    
    At least this developer has a much easier time reading the range-diffs
    that way.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJohannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJunio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
    a7be92ac