Whatever happened to all the pretext hype? I feel like that would be perfect for rendering huge diffs.
Can you select and copy text with pretext?
On Rendering Diffs
21–30 of 73 posts
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#22I was hoping that this would talk more about the logic behind generating a diff, rather than the optimisations involved in rendering the text. IMO (as someone who doesn't have to deal with the actual rendering) it would go a bit deeper into talking about deciding how to show what has changed. There's a lot of improvements that could be made there. e.g. "whitespace has changed here" so there's no real code changes inv…
> rather than the optimizations involved in rendering the text. Any views they have on this topic is going to come across as quite opinionated given their choices for text rendering for this post and general aesthetics of website.
Naw, the truth is I'm not really smart or intelligent enough to build a semantic diff system. For that you'll need to wait on a post from one of our smarter devs, this was a post about rendering diffs in a browser.
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#23I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth.
On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap.
I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't.
I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile probably having the lowest device performance to be playing with too, but.. There you go.
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#24I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth. On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap. I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't. I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile proba…
Matters a great deal on desktop too, and laptops for that matter. Even more on platforms like macOS that smooths scrolling by default too, but very noticeable on Windows and various Linux distributions too when native scrolling is janky/choppy, and it frustrates even casual users.
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#25I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth. On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap. I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't. I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile proba…
> disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth
It's possible you might be misunderstanding what I was trying to say here because 120hz scrolling on a 120hz device was the goal and why one of those virtualization techniques was not acceptable to me which lead me to coming up with a novel workaround to this problem (Inverse Sticky Technique).
CodeView uses a system that allows scrolling to update at your native framerate (120hz) WITHOUT needing Javascript needing to keep up at 120hz. If you're seeing stuttering while scrolling on https://diffshub.com would love to know more context (device/diff link/etc) because that is very much NOT our experience.
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#26I don’t have much to say except I appreciate the ASCII art.
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#27It is SO NICE to see people working on making fast, nice-to-use tools. It's a lovely experience to use diffshub. Thank you for creating it, and than you for the great write-up! (I made it "that far" )
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#28I was hoping that this would talk more about the logic behind generating a diff, rather than the optimisations involved in rendering the text. IMO (as someone who doesn't have to deal with the actual rendering) it would go a bit deeper into talking about deciding how to show what has changed. There's a lot of improvements that could be made there. e.g. "whitespace has changed here" so there's no real code changes inv…
Most projects start with tree-sitter and then switch to language-native parsers. Either way, it's not something you solve yourself – you just find the language-specific implementation load megabytes of WASM on the frontend or generate it on the backend.
difftastic, semanticdiff.. lots of projects like that. Obviously they can offer stuff like "function name changed" instead of showing you 30 lines of +newName -oldName
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#29What an interesting article. I did not assume I would read it until the end when I opened it, but the writing was super clear and easy to follow.
At the end, I admire the craft and patience to try to solve code diff rendering, and wish the folks at GitHub could put the same effort to improve their platform.
On a side note, I feel that we’re going to see more and more of this type of agentic usage, in well defined sub tasks, and the ability of a model to try many possibilities is a huge gift here.
Re: On Rendering Diffs
#30I disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth. On mobile it kinda does. Scrolling diffs on mobile just kinda feels crap. I have been spoiled by years of engineer hours spent getting scrolling to be 60- or even 120Hz smooth to match my finger, and diffs just.. isn't. I know this is frustrating to hear, and that this is technically compounded by mobile proba…
> disagree with the theory that scrolling frame rate doesn't need to be smooth for scrolling to feel smooth It's possible you might be misunderstanding what I was trying to say here because 120hz scrolling on a 120hz device was the goal and why one of those virtualization techniques was not acceptable to me which lead me to coming up with a novel workaround to this problem (Inverse Sticky Technique). CodeView uses a…
Even the linked ghostty PR on your home shows this - this is Firefox Android on a Nokia XR21 / TA-1486.
It's not unuseable, but it definitely feels like 'js hacking my scrolling' and not a native surface flinging around.
The experience is actually worse with smaller movements, i guess because my brain is more conscious when breaking the 'finger physically moving the text' illusion.
I don't mean to be dismissive - you're working on a really hard problem, and you're clearly approaching it with a mindset of perfection. I'm posting because I know you're probably able to solve this too :)
Edit: as a point of (unfair) comparison, the codemirror Huge File demo works fine: https://codemirror.net/examples/million/ It does suffer from the occasional partial paint when quickly coasting, but I'm not bothered by this at all, it's far less intrusive than dropping frames / stuttering / etc.