Feature Request: Add Option to Filter and Cycle Differences by Recency (with Project Setup and Merge History)

[mjoe67886]

Description:

WinMerge is an outstanding tool for comparing and merging files, but I believe one feature could make it even more powerful for users working on large projects with many incremental changes. Specifically, the ability to filter and cycle through the most recent differences would be a huge time-saver for users who frequently need to merge updates across multiple versions of files, especially when the changes span over days or weeks.

Use Case and Workflow:

I’m working on a large Blender add-on that is broken into multiple modules. One of the files is almost identical between two versions of the add-on, except for around 100 differences necessary for each version to work as intended. These differences are small, but the files are large—approximately 20,000 lines of code.

To make the development process more efficient, I’ve merged the two versions of the file so that they’re both nearly identical, with only the necessary differences remaining. At the end of each day, I make incremental changes to one file, and at the end of the day, I merge the differences between the two files. However, this can be tedious when I need to go through a large number of differences, especially when I only need to merge recent changes from that day.

Currently, I manually cycle through all the differences, but with hundreds of already merged changes, it becomes inefficient. What would help is a way to filter and cycle through only the most recent differences, making it much easier to merge the relevant changes and avoid having to sift through everything.

Proposed Solution:

I propose adding a feature where users can filter differences by recency. This feature would work as follows:

Initial Setup: The user sets up their files ahead of time, ensuring that the two files are mostly identical with only necessary differences. It’s assumed that both files are in a state where they have already been merged, and only a small number of differences remain.

Time-based Filtering: After the initial setup, users could filter differences based on recency using a dropdown and a checkbox next to the "Up" and "Down" buttons for cycling through differences. The user could select a time frame (e.g., last 1 hour, last 3 hours, last 5 hours, custom) and only cycle through the differences that were made within that time frame.

Hourly Filtering: To accommodate frequent updates, it would be helpful if the user could set a filter that allows them to cycle through changes from the past 1 hour up to 24 hours. This would make it easier to merge updates at the end of the day or after a specific period of time.
Merge History (Optional Enhancement): To make this even better, when users open their project to merge differences, it could display the last merge date and time. This would help users quickly identify when the last merge occurred, making it easier to determine which changes to review and merge.

How It Would Help My Workflow:

Streamlined Merging: This feature would allow me to quickly filter out the differences I’ve already merged and focus only on the changes I made today. For instance, if I’ve made 5 changes in the last hour, I can filter to only see those 5, rather than cycling through 100 previous changes that I’ve already handled.

Efficient Updates: If I need to upload an urgent update and realize I forgot to merge recent changes, I could quickly set the filter to last 1 hour or last 3 hours and only merge the changes from that period.

Time-Saving and Focused Merging: This feature would allow me to cycle through only the most recent changes, speeding up the process of merging updates and minimizing distractions from older, already-merged differences.

Conclusion:

This feature would be a game-changer for anyone who works with large files that change incrementally over time. It would allow users to focus on the most relevant changes, save time when merging, and keep their files synchronized with minimal effort. It would make WinMerge even more powerful and would help users like me merge files with large codebases or multiple versions much more efficiently.

Additionally, the option to display the last merge date and time and filter changes by timeframe would make the entire merging process more intuitive and user-friendly.

I hope the WinMerge team will consider adding this feature to help streamline workflows for developers and users working with large or incremental changes. Thank you for your consideration! Each feature that you add like this will solidify your software being the most prized in the industry. I don't know if you supply it on a website and benefit from companies that will pay you to advertise on it but if you start doing this, the more prized your software is the more traffic your website will get and the more money you get from advertising.