Merging Changes

Diffoniq is not only a viewer. In a text file comparison you can take lines from one side over to the other and write the result back to disk — which is how you resolve the differences you have just looked at.

Copying an area onto the other side

1. Mark the lines you want to take over. Click or drag with the left mouse button on the side you want to copy from; the marked area is highlighted. See Mouse Operations.
2. Drag the marked area to the other pane. Press the left button on the marking again and move the mouse across the separator. The mouse cursor shows whether the drop is accepted there.
3. Release the button. The marked lines replace the corresponding lines on the other side.

Two things are worth knowing about the result:

• It is a copy. The side you dragged from is not changed.
• The lines land on the corresponding area, not where you released the mouse. Diffoniq replaces exactly the rows that face the marked ones, so the two sides stay aligned. Only the pane you release over matters, not the exact spot.

Where merging is possible

Merging is available in text file comparisons. The side that receives the lines has to be writable — the side you drag from does not:

• Dragging out of a read-only side onto a writable one is allowed on purpose. That is the everyday case with git difftool or a Tortoise client: the revision they hand over is a temporary copy opened with /read-only-left, and you lift a line out of it into your working file.
• If the receiving side is not writable, the drag does not start — a click simply marks a new area instead. That is the case in directory, archive, image, binary and version-info views, for files opened from inside an archive (modifications cannot be written back into the archive), for files carrying the read-only attribute, and for a side locked with /read-only.

Through the clipboard instead

The same area can travel through the Windows clipboard: Copy puts the marked lines there, Paste replaces a marked area with the clipboard contents, and Clear marks the area as deleted. Use this to move text between two Diffoniq windows or in from another program.

Making it permanent

All of this happens in memory first. A line changed by a merge is marked with a + next to its line number, and an asterisk appears in front of the file name in that pane's header. Nothing is written until you choose Save Modifications (Ctrl+S).

Every step can be taken back with Undo (Ctrl+Z) and reapplied with Redo (Ctrl+Y), as long as the comparison is not reloaded.

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