Changes 1.5
Changes 1.5 is much more useful than previous versions thanks to a new “SCM HUD” window that lets you, from your editor, select two revisions of the current file to compare. It currently works with Git and Subversion.
Overall, I prefer the Find Differences feature in BBEdit (and TextWrangler) for processing differences one at a time, and I prefer viewing git diff patches color-coded in TextMate to get the big picture of what’s changed. Changes seems suited to an in-between case, where you want to see what’s changed and also make a few edits. All these tools are better than FileMerge, of course.
I found the default color scheme confusing, as I’m used to red meaning deleted, not changed. A gray background with blue text seemed to work better.
Likes:
- The option to show only the lines that are different is very useful, as it eliminates needless scrolling.
- The SCM HUD is easily invoked via AppleScript, so although it doesn’t integrate with Xcode out of the box, it was easy to write an integration script, which I hooked up via FastScripts.
- It’s extensible to other version control systems by writing short adapter scripts. This is a great use of PyObjC.
Dislikes:
- The SCM HUD does not track files that were renamed, even though Git can do this.
- The SCM HUD’s display is cluttered with all the fields on one line, separated by spaces. It would be nice if it used columns instead.
- There’s no support for syntax coloring, so files aren’t as easy to read as in your editor.
- There’s no way to change the background color of the text.
- There’s no soft-wrapping for long lines.
- The AppleScript support is limited. You cannot access the list of windows or see which files are being compared. (I wanted to be able to send the files to BBEdit.)
- I rarely complain about software prices, and I’m all for supporting good Mac developers, but the $50 price seems out of line for the current feature set.
