Kaleidoscope 5.0.3
Recently, we have spent a lot of time on many aspects of the folder comparison feature for Kaleidoscope 4.4 and 4.5. We have overhauled some of the underpinnings and worked hard to improve reliability and speed. But we also added some major new features. It’s time to tell you a bit what they are and how you can benefit from those changes.
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Now you can expand any folder, synchronously in A and B, without the need to open a new document. In addition, upon completion of the difference calculation, Kaleidoscope will automatically expand folders with changes in them and leave all the others collapsed. This means you’ll get an overview of all changes with no additional interaction required.
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As you are making changes to folders you are comparing, Kaleidoscope will dynamically and quickly update the comparison, on any level.
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When Date Modified or Size for an item is the same between A and B, a regular font is used. If there is a difference, the font style is bolder. In addition, the side with the more recent date or the bigger size is shown in blue, providing you with information at a glance.
I’ve been really impressed with the pace of improvements since they switched to the subscription model about a year ago.
Kaleidoscope 5 (Mastodon, tweet):
While we had started to integrate Git over the last few releases, Kaleidoscope 5 is reaching a new level, enabling you to dig into the history of your coding projects like never before.
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Git Repositories are now an intrinsic part of Kaleidoscope. They show up automatically as you start comparing files that reside in git working directories.
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From the sidebar of a git-backed changeset, you can now open the history or any file in that changeset. This lets you learn how that file evolved over time. And in the opposite direction, when finding interesting changes in the history of a file, you can now quickly see the changeset of an entire commit.
The new Git features are great. I’m finding myself using Kaleidoscope alongside Tower for certain tasks. Kaleidoscope doesn’t even attempt to do most of what Tower does, but there are times when it’s quicker or better to open up a comparison or file history in Kaleidoscope.
I really like how the main Kaleidoscope window keeps a history of recent comparisons, both globally and per-repository. In the initial 5.0 version, opening the Git file history was really slow, but this was quickly fixed, and now the speed is on-par with Tower, with Kaleidoscope tracking some revisions through renames that Tower missed. It’s very easy to select two specific versions of a file to compare, and you can quickly move down the list and see the commit messages for each version, but it’s awkward to quickly zip through the changes for the versions (which in Tower you can do just by pressing the Down Arrow key).
The subscription price has dipped slightly from $99/year to $96/year.
Kaleidoscope 5 introduces a groundbreaking feature that allows users to effortlessly open the changeset for any Git commit. This feature comes in two distinct forms tailored to accommodate all macOS applications: one leveraging a system service and the other integrated with Kaleidoscope Prism. Both options can be further optimized by adding a keyboard shortcut for swift execution.
See also: Filipe Espósito.
Previously:
