After an unexpectedly long transition, Meld 3.12 is the first stable release of Meld based on GTK+ 3. As usual, plenty has changed. While a lot of work this time around was behind the scenes, some of that work has enabled cool new features as well.

Appearance

Everything looks… newer. With the update to GTK+ 3, we’ve removed the use of some older widgets—most notably the old-style file selectors—and somewhat modernised the layout and overall visual appearance. We’ve also cleaned up some icons to be a little more balanced, and updated the overall colour scheme. While not ready yet, the next release cycle will also see support for global dark theme settings.

Theme improvements for 3.12 Upcoming dark theme support

Under GNOME Shell, Meld will integrate into the GNOME 3 style application menu, and we’ll fall back to adding a new “Meld” menu for other platforms.

Comparisons

Pane resizing—a long-standing feature request, finally picked up by Marco Brito—has been merged. Hopefully this will make comparisons easier for those of you who stuck trying to do a three-way merge on a 13” screen.

File comparisons now show a notification if a file is modified outside of Meld, and prompt to reload. We also display better labels for file comparisons launched from version control, so you should no longer see useless temporary file names here.

In folder comparisons, if you have a folder that’s empty after filtering has been applied, that folder will (finally) be correctly trimmed from the tree. We also now use normal desktop trash handling for file operations, instead of just deleting things forever without warning…

Marking conflicts resolved

On the version control side of things, we have some support for showing file metadata, including renames thanks to Louis des Landes. Currently this is only used by Bazaar, but we’ll hopefully extend this support to Git and Mercurial soon. Finally, as a handy touch, for conflict resolutions that you start from a Meld version control tab, we now prompt to mark a conflict as resolved when you close the file comparison.

Help and translation

Yelp browsing new Meld help

Meld now uses Mallard for documentation, and there’s a hack script that we use to provide online help for non-GNOME platforms.

Thanks to the thoroughly awesome GNOME Translation Teams, Meld’s translations are looking good, with several full translations for the new manual as well! Of course, our translation coverage could always be better, so if you notice gaps in your native language support, please consider joining a team to help out.

Windows support

While Meld has worked on Windows for some time, we are now building and distributing stand-alone Windows installers for Meld. Some of our Windows support is still a little rough around the edges, but with more users and a better distribution story, you can expect to see this situation continue to improve in the coming release cycles. Thanks go to Keegan Witt for maintaining the unofficial binary distribution, and for helping out with the transition.

Behind the scenes

Meld is now a single-instance application, using the GtkApplication model. By default Meld will still use multiple windows, and each command-line process will wait until its window has closed, so from a user point of view, very little should change.

With the transition to the newer GTK+ 3 platform and related tools, we’ve also cleaned up tonnes of unpleasant code. Preferences handling has been rewritten, our custom colours are CSS-themed and we’ve moved to making heavier use of the excellent GtkSourceView library.

Future plans

By the time you read this, 3.12 will probably have already branched, and some pending stuff for 3.13 will be going in. My list of things-to-merge already includes incremental find for file comparisons, better dark theme support, and a rework of conflict resolution mode to show a combination of the pre-merged file with ancestor information for conflicting sections.

If you’d like to get involved with Meld development then please get in touch on the mailing list: meld-list@gnome.org.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the release, whether through features, translations or bugfixes: Andika Triwidada, Bartosz Dziewoński, Ben Ross, Benjamin Steinwender, Casey, Christoph Brill, Daniel Mustieles, Daniel Pantea, Dimitris Spingos, Dominique Leuenberger, Enrico Nicoletto, Facundo Dario Illanes, fr33domlover, Fran Diéguez, Gabor Kelemen, Gianni Trovisi, Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio, Jiri Grönroos, Josef Andersson, Kai Willadsen, Lars Wendler, Lasse Liehu, Louis des Landes, Marco Brito, Marek Černocký, Matej Urbančič, Milo Casagrande, Peter Tyser, Piotr Drąg, Rafael Ferreira, Thomas Klausner, Tom Scytale, Tom Tryfonidis, Ville-Pekka Vainio, Yuri Myasoedov, zodiac111, Özgür Sarıer, Мирослав Николић