Settings

It’s easy to make DeltaWalker Classic work the way you do. A lot of it will happen behind the scenes, transparently to you—the rest is just a click or two away.

In the ‘transparent to you’ category is the comparison history— DeltaWalker Classic automatically creates a history entry for every comparison you successfully complete, so that later you can run it the very same way you last did. Another notable member of the ‘transparent to you’ club is everything you do with the main window—every change to its layout, position, and size gets recorded so that next time you launch it, it looks the way you left it, including opening all comparison windows that were opened at the time the app was shut down. DeltaWalker Classic remembers all that so that you don’t have to, and next time you launch it, it appears exactly the way it was when you last closed it.

In the ‘click or two away’ category are a wealth of settings available through the Settings window—from controlling the speed, accuracy, and output of the differencing algorithms, to general application options such as fonts, colors, appearance, and shortcut keys.

Opening the Settings window

• Choose DeltaWalker Classic > Settings… or press Cmd + ,. On Windows and Linux, choose Edit > Preferences… or press Ctrl + ,. The window opens on the Application tab.
• Click the Settings button on the main toolbar. The window opens on the tab of the comparison you are working with or, when there is no text or folder comparison active, on the New Comparisons tab.

Apply and Close applies the changes made on all the tabs together; Cancel, or the Esc key, closes the window without applying them. Each tab remembers the page you looked at last.

The three tabs

The Settings window has up to three tabs. They keep their changes apart, so you can look at one while you are in the middle of changing another.

Application

The Application tab holds the settings of DeltaWalker Classic itself and of the way it looks. They apply across comparisons, and to the application as a whole.

• General: the theme, the memory DeltaWalker Classic may use, what it starts with, how much it remembers, alerts and sounds, software updates, and logging. Under it: Keys, Content Types, SCM Integration and, in the Mac App Store edition, Trusted Paths.
• Appearance: scrolling, and under it the colors and fonts and the look of folder comparisons, text comparisons and image comparisons.
• Text Editing: how text files are edited, and under it the text editors.

New Comparisons

When you create a new comparison, its settings are a snapshot of the settings on the New Comparisons tab. Once such a snapshot is created and becomes a part of a comparison, these settings become the settings of that comparison and are independent from the New Comparisons settings. Independent here means that changes to the New Comparisons settings won’t affect existing comparisons and vice versa.

• All Comparisons: how files are compared, and under it the text filters and the remote connections.
• Folder Comparisons: how folders are compared, and under it their filters.

The active comparison

As soon as a new comparison successfully completes, DeltaWalker Classic automatically creates a new entry in its comparison history capturing all specifics of that comparison such that the comparison can easily be re-run at a later time in the same way. The specifics include the settings of the comparison, the resource paths being compared, and, in the case of a remote comparison, the specifics of the remote connection—your credentials, etc.

The settings of a particular comparison represent a snapshot of the New Comparisons settings made at the time the comparison was created. From that point on, comparison settings have a life of their own, independent of the New Comparisons settings.

When a text or folder comparison is active, the Settings window has a third tab, named after that comparison, for example report.txt ↔ report.txt. It has the same pages as the New Comparisons tab, but what you change on them applies to that comparison alone. A text comparison has no folder pages. The tab is not available while the comparison is running. Image and other kinds of comparison have no settings of their own.

Finding a setting

Type in the Search… field above the list of pages to find a page by its name or by the settings on it: scroll, intro alert or ignore case, for instance. Every word you type has to begin a word of the page’s name or of the label of one of its settings, in any order. The list shows the pages found on the tab you are on, those with a match of their own in bold, and the page showing is the first of them, with the settings found highlighted. When nothing is found on the tab, the list tells you which of the other tabs have matches. Press Return to move from the field to the list, and clear the field to see every page again.