Meld has a rough time with showing recent comparisons. The fundamental problem here is that toolkit support for recently-used files assumes that each entry is a single file. I can’t blame the toolkit for thinking this, since there’s probably less than a handful of cases where this isn’t true, but since almost all comparisons in Meld involve two or three files, it makes our life hard.

Hackety hack hack

The hack that we have for this is to create fake .meldcmp files in the user’s data directory (e.g., ~/.local/share/meld/) that contain a simple description of the comparison, and then tell the recently used files API that actually, this is the file the user opened. The files are in a pretty boring format:

[Comparison]
type = File
paths = /home/foo/a.txt;/home/foo/b.txt

Meld knows how to recreate a comparison from one of these files, and to support opening them from a desktop shell (which looks awful for completely unrelated reasons) we accept them as command line parameters.

“Project” support

One upshot of the above is that users can (ab)use this support to pre-define a comparison and open it from the command line. Say that you saved the above file into the ab.meldcmp, you could reopen this obviously vital comparison with:

meld --comparison-file=ab.meldcmp

While we currently don’t support anything more exciting, there’s nothing stopping us from adding more “project” style setup to these files… you know, other than fear of complexity and feature creep.