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Suggestion
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Resolution: Fixed
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J2RE 1.4, Apache Tomcat 4.1.31
Currently when you're viewing the differences between two revisions of a page, you see the whole page in the diff output, even if there for example was only one small change at the bottom. (the same is true for automatically generated notification emails)
It would be nice if Confluence could output only the changed lines in context of a few unchanged lines, like e.g. the Unix diff tool does. The diff is nice, but if you have to scroll down the whole page to see what actually was changed it sort of loses a lot of it's usefulness. The notification emails would also be much easier to read.
[CONFSERVER-6445] Visual page diff tool: Only display that part of a diff that actually has changes
this has since been implemented over the course of the past few releases. For example, Confluence 3.0 introduced the "view diffs in email" functionality.
Just to explain the problem better: the diff should be smart enough to show only what changed and the context.
By context I mean a configurable number of lines before change and after change, usually 3.
This feature is important because if someone is changing one line on a 1000 lines pages you'll have to load and scroll a lot in order to see the change.
The number of lines should be configured in user preferences also we could consider that value 0 would disable this feature and show the entire page (like now).
Thanks for the suggestion, Thomas.
I don't think we should remove the existing view (I find it easier to understand the changes when they have context), but we could definitely have an option for showing just a "minimal" view of the changes.
Did you know that the coloured arrows on the side are for jumping between changes? There's a link at the top of the page to jump to the first change, so you don't need to scroll to it.
Bill + Matt, could you please add a screenshot of "the coloured arrows on the side [that] are for jumping between changes"? In Confluence 4.1.3 I neither find such buttons to jump to the next/previous change nor are only changed parts of the page displayed – so changes of single characters in a 10+ screen wiki page are quite hard to spot.