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Comment by Newky | Hacker News Reader

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Newky·

I have to agree.

The fact that you still cannot do side by side diffs on pull requests makes it a less than useful code review tool.

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What's the difference between a diff and a side-by-side view of two files? I'd (usually) prefer the former.

It is difficult to follow the code that's been added when all the deletions/diffs get in the way.

I agree. I find that unified diffs work well 90% of the time but when it doesn't it can be crippling. I've attached some screenshots at

http://screenshots.gitsense.com/index.html

that illustrates where side by side becomes a requirement for me. Yeah I can make sense of things with a unified view but the side by side really makes things more obvious.

Note you can find this diff at github at https://github.com/joyent/node/pull/5615/files#L0L80

What program or tool were you using to see the diffs side by side ?

It's from my tool that I've been developing. You can see how the diffing works at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi7GvcW1NKA

Unfortunately I don't show you how to switch to the side by side view. To do this, you just click on the view toggle button at the top left corner of the diff window.

Nice Work! That sounds similar to Meld. http://meldmerge.org/

Take a look at a pull request on bitbucket. Like this one:

https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/sphinx/pull-request/146/res...

Click 'Side-by-Side Diff'. Github has a lot going for it, but bitbucket is the clear UX win as far as reviewing pull requests goes.

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