Re:Plain text, with lines
by incanus77 on Monday June 06, 2022 @12:09PM
(#31642270)
You’ve literally contradicted yourself between the two paragraphs. You’ve said that powerful tools exist, but for people who need or appreciate line-by-line diffing, they should adapt to the state of the tools as they exist today.
I would argue that we’ve been too lazy to create powerful programs with open formats that do work well with Git and other line-by-line diff systems. Version control as functionality is a solved problem (yes, it’s got lots of usability problems and should probably make it impossible for a user to lose work, but those are separate from this discussion). Creating a hack that does in fact adapt the text tools to us (defining us as, like the author, someone who wants to use plain text) is exactly what they’ve done.
I would argue that we’ve been too lazy to create powerful programs with open formats that do work well with Git and other line-by-line diff systems. Version control as functionality is a solved problem (yes, it’s got lots of usability problems and should probably make it impossible for a user to lose work, but those are separate from this discussion). Creating a hack that does in fact adapt the text tools to us (defining us as, like the author, someone who wants to use plain text) is exactly what they’ve done.