Tips & Tricks
Search, Don’t Scroll
In a folder comparison window, find the files and folders you care about as quickly as you type. Type in the Search for file or folder field, and the trees are filtered and the matches highlighted as you type—even in hierarchies with thousands of items.
Search combines with the folder comparison’s other visibility filters, so you can look at your data from different angles.
Merge Buttons
DeltaWalker Classic’s merge buttons appear right next to a difference when you need them, and not a second longer. With them, you can replace, add, and delete a difference.
Bird’s-eye View
The Bird’s-eye View shows the following information about the differences:
- type: deletion, addition, change, and conflict (three-way comparison only)
- size
- frequency
- distribution
- the selection, if any
Click a marker in the Bird’s-eye View to bring the difference it represents into view and select it.
Comparison Summary Panels
The comparison summary panels at the right end of the status bar adapt to what you are comparing—files or folders. They show:
- The essence of the comparison summary at a glance.
- A legend for the delta colors—the colors for deletion, addition, change, and conflict.
Navigating Differences
Besides the Navigate > Next Delta (Cmd+Shift+Down) and Navigate > Previous Delta (Cmd+Shift+Up) menu items and their toolbar buttons, DeltaWalker Classic offers two more ways to navigate differences:
- The navigation mini-buttons just below the common scroll bar.
- Cmd and the mouse wheel: hold down Cmd and turn the mouse wheel to go to the next or previous difference.
Go to Previous / Next Edit Location
In a file comparison window, press Cmd+8 to go to your previous edit, or Cmd+7 to go to your next edit.
Key Assist
Knowing the shortcut keys is the fastest way around DeltaWalker Classic’s text editors. Press Cmd+Shift+L to bring up the Key Assist window, which lists the shortcut keys available where you are.
Finding a String Incrementally
Choose Edit > Incremental Find Next (Cmd+J) or Edit > Incremental Find Previous (Cmd+Shift+J) to enter incremental find mode, and start typing the string to find. Matches are found as you type, and the search string is shown in the status bar. Press Cmd+J or Cmd+Shift+J again to go to the next or previous match. Press Return or Esc to leave incremental find mode.
Switching Between Comparison Windows
To switch quickly between comparison windows, press Cmd+E: it displays a list of all open comparison windows. Start typing to narrow the list down to the window you want. You can also close windows from the list, with its context menu or the Delete key.
Shortcut Key Picks
Here are some of the shortcut keys you’d wish your favorite text editor also had:
- Move lines up or down: Option+Up and Option+Down.
- Copy lines up or down: Cmd+Option+Up and Cmd+Option+Down.
- Insert a new line above or below the current line: Cmd+Shift+Return and Shift+Return.
- Convert to lowercase or uppercase: Cmd+Shift+Y and Cmd+Shift+X.
XML Prettification and Canonicalization
XML files are text files, yet they represent hierarchical data. A text comparison of XML files is often enough, but at times the results might not be what you expect. For instance, the text comparison reports two XML files with logically identical content as different when their elements list attributes in a different order, or when their formatting differs. XML is designed to be human-readable, but it is often generated by programs, and different programs format XML and order attributes differently.
When comparing XML files, DeltaWalker Classic can either prettify or canonicalize their content: right-click in the text and choose Prettify XML or Canonicalize XML. Prettification typically gives a more compact and better aligned representation, and keeps comments. Canonicalization is more conservative about which spaces and line breaks it removes, orders attributes alphabetically, and strips all comments.
Folder and File Comparison Side by Side
DeltaWalker Classic integrates folder and file comparison closely, so that you see both the forest and the trees. Browse through your folder comparison results and, when a file catches your attention, double-click it: DeltaWalker Classic opens it for comparison just below the folder comparison window (the default position).
Tiling File Comparison Windows
You can drag and drop to change the layout of the editor area—the area occupied by the comparison windows. Drag a comparison window’s tab to an edge of the editor area.
Minimizing and Maximizing Windows
To maximize a folder or file comparison window, double-click its tab. For instance, maximizing a file comparison window minimizes the folder comparison window to an icon in a toolbar at the edge of the application window.
Character Encoding
DeltaWalker Classic is Unicode-based and detects the character encoding of many, but not all, text files. Unicode encodings are typically easy to detect thanks to the byte-order mark at the start of the file, while single-byte character sets don’t lend themselves to automatic detection. If an encoding is detected incorrectly, many or all characters appear garbled.
If DeltaWalker Classic does not detect the character encoding of a file correctly, you can select it in several places:
- The Select File dialog, when you select the file to open.
- The Select Character Encoding dialog, after the file has been opened for comparison.
- The Save File dialog, to change the character encoding of a file just before you save it.
- The Text Editing settings, to select the default encoding—language or character set—for new text files created in DeltaWalker Classic.
Line Endings
As with character encoding, you can change the line endings of a text file in several places:
- The Select File dialog, when you select the file to open.
- The File > Convert Line Endings To menu.
- The Save File dialog, to change the line endings of a file just before you save it.
- The Text Editing settings, to select the default line ending for new text files.