Not much.

Oh, okay a few things, but really nothing exciting.

Prettier, searchier file comparison

Meld now has limited support for GtkSourceView style schemes for syntax highlighting. The ‘limited’ bit here is that our chunk highlight colours are still taken from CSS; this will change in 3.15.

Also thanks to GtkSourceView, Meld now supports incremental search with nice match highlighting and other related fixes. So while the find-replace interface is due for an overhaul, at least we now do nice things in the back-end.

Clearer folder comparisons

Folder and file comparisons used to get into a weird state where one checked for line ending differences and the other did not. We’re now more consistent here, with folder comparisons using our existing same-once-filtered styling for files that are identical except for line endings.

As additional niceties, folder comparisons now have a “everything is identical” notification like file comparisons had, and we now remember the expansion state of subtrees in folder comparisons to better support folding and unfolding.

Random fixes

Meld 3.12 was the first to use new GTK+ 3 and associated bits, so a fair bit of effort went into fixing little bits and pieces from the port. Command-line handling should now behave better. We handle Unicode file names better in a few cases, including several fixes to handling Unicode paths in Git repositories. Some of our custom widgets that had bad behaviour in RTL locales have been fixed.

Upcoming stuff

As previous maintainer-grumpiness might indicate, this was a challenging release cycle due to a bunch of issues including some problems related to newer GTK+ versions. Fixing this took a bunch of time and energy, but the future is looking decidedly brighter.

Specifically, the positive-but-very-painful drawing changes in GtkTextView are going to start actually benefiting us. Meld 3.15 will do all its change drawing in a relatively sane way, which also lets us take advantage of some performance improvements in GTK+.

The version bump required to get the new GTK+ API for better drawing will also mean that we can update to better argument handling provided by updates to GApplication. This should significantly increase the sanity levels of our current argument and instance handling, and might help us fix a few weird corner-cases where multiple windows really don’t do what you might expect.

A GtkSourceView version bump gets us more cool stuff, including access to their awesome GtkSourceFileLoader/Saver classes, which will significantly improve our performance, and more importantly gets us one step closer to actually handling non-local file comparison properly.

Finally, a to-be-merged rework of our version control handling should fix some long-standing issues with consistency between our supported version control systems, as well as improving performance. Unfortunately this comes at the cost of removing support for existing version control plugins with no maintainers, but hopefully we’ll recover some of these before the 3.16 release.