Text Compare Settings

To adjust options for the text comparison, go to:

Kaleidoscope > Settings… > Text

The following settings are available:

Appearance

• Choose whether the overall appearance should switch with the system appearance or rather always stay light or dark.

• Select the overall theme for text display. This also influences background and text color.

• Decide whether to use Syntax Highlighting to style text written in formal languages (such as programming languages).

• Have text differences (Added, Deleted, and Changed) shown in different colors or in a single color.

Font

• Choose font and size to use for text.

• Set the line height a bit more dense, normal or more relaxed.

• Set the number of spaces to inset for a tab character.

View Settings

• Wrap Long Lines: choose whether long lines should wrap to keep all text visible on screen, or stay on a line, showing scroll bars instead.

• Show Line Numbers: toggle the line number column.

• Show Invisible Characters: when enabled, Kaleidoscope shows so-called invisible characters (tab, newline, …) in areas with differences. A secondary setting defines whether invisible characters are shown only within changed areas, or in the entire document.

Processing

• Ignore Differences in Whitespace: depending on your content, differences in whitespace (tabs or newlines) may not be relevant to make up a “change“. Use this setting to set the ignore behavior to suit your needs.

• Normalize JSON: As the order of keys in a JSON object does not have significance and is thus often “random“, it is very hard to compare JSON, in particular when it has been written by a generator. Normalization will impose a default order and formatting, enabling a visual comparison between two bits of JSON content. However, for some use cases this may not be desirable.

Note: JSON normalization may cause numbers to (slightly) change due to rounding. This is a side-effect of the Apple JSON parser used for normalization. We are not aware of a workaround. While weird to look at, comparison results won't change, as the rounding errors are deterministic.