Text Comparison Views

Kaleidoscope's Text Comparison offers three ways of viewing the changes between two text documents: Fluid, Blocks and Unified.

You can switch between the Fluid, Blocks and Unified views by using one of the following methods:

Choose Blocks, Fluid or Unified from the layout switcher, located in the toolbar.
Choose Blocks, Fluid or Unified from the View menu.

Blocks Layout

Fluid Layout

Fluid layout compresses empty spaces providing a natural reading experience while reviewing changes.

Unified Layout

Unified layout interleaves your possible choices on the left with your final output on the right, providing a concise, readable way to merge.

Searching

To search in the Text Scope:

Open the search toolbar by using the cmd+F keyboard short cut or choose Edit > Find.
Type your search term into the text field.
In the Fluid and Blocks views, you can select which file you want to search in, A or B.
Use the Next/Previous buttons in the toolbar to go to the next or previous search result.
You can also use the ⌘G or ⌘⇧G keyboard shortcuts to go to the next or previous search result.

Navigating Changes

You can move to the next or previous change by using one of the following methods:

Click next or previous in the change stepper, located in the bottom toolbar.
Choose View > Next Change or View > Previous Change.

If you are using a track pad with gesture support, you can use the “Three Finger Swipe to Navigate“ gesture to go to the next and previous changes. Make sure that this gestures is enabled in the System Preferences (Trackpad > More Gestures > Swipe between pages, ensure the “three finger“ option is included).

View Options

There are various options to further customize the text view to your liking, like font and size choices, options to wrap long lines, show or hide line numbers, and more. You find them in the View menu and many of them also in the bottom left toolbar area for even quicker access. New windows will always use the default behavior defined in the Text Scope Preferences. Choose Kaleidoscope > Preferences > Text to set your preferences.

Ignoring Whitespace

You can choose to ignore leading, trailing and line-ending whitespace differences by default. To set the whitespace setting:

Kaleidoscope > Settings… > Text > Whitespace

To turn whitespace ignoring on or off per document, use the Ignore Whitespace button in the bottom toolbar or the menu entry in View menu.

Kaleidoscope only uses the Ignore Whitespace setting in the normal Text Scope. It is not applicable to Folder Scope comparisons, merges or changeset documents.