Kaleidoscope 6
Kaleidoscope can now hide equal blocks of text by collapsing them into a single expandable line. This significantly shortens text comparisons when most of the text in A and B is identical. Collapsing unchanged lines lets you quickly focus on the differences, assuming familiarity with the text.
I really like this feature. It’s much easier to quickly see the changes, and it actually works better than in Tower because you can selectively show the hidden lines when you need to see more context.
In addition to globally toggling all unchanged areas, you can quickly expand a single pair of collapsed areas to reveal more context for a change. Click the ellipsis button inside a collapsed area. It changes color on hover to indicate its interactivity.
Kaleidoscope has been growing on me as a Git helper tool (vs. specifically to compare two files) because I can quickly drag and drop the current file from BBEdit onto Kaleidoscope’s Dock icon to browse its commit history. Tower still refuses to support this workflow and makes it hard to see the full commit messages once you do get it to show a file’s history.
Previously:
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Have you tried Fork? Every time I read a post about Kaleidoscope or Tower, I want to give them another chance. They seem to have a 20% better UX, but then basic features are missing (or added years later) such as:
- Comparing two commits without an external diff tool
- Double-clicking a commit to check out the assiociated branch
- Syntax highlighting in Tower
- The ability to collapse unchanged segments and control the size of context-lines around changes.
There is probably an issue with familiarity, but the high price and 30-day trial period make it hard to get familiar with these two tools.
@Sebastian I’ve tried Fork, and it’s fine, but I prefer Tower. I agree that it’s missing some basics, but it does do syntax highlighting and lets you adjust the context size.
I adore Fork. Its one of the few pieces of software I've used in the last decade that provides great functionality in an elegant and well designed native experience. I love that it's native on both Windows and macOS, and the two person development team goes out of their way to maintain feature parity between the two versions. So I go out of my way to proselytize for it because I don't want to see it disappear!
Admittedly I have not tried Kaleidoscope or Tower. I'm impressed they too seem to use native UI. (Do correct me if I'm wrong.) I am however disinclined to use them due to fatigue over subscription pricing. Another great thing about Fork is that it's a one time purchase, and actually does it the old "shareware" way of asking the users to pay for it.
