Yellow Edited Text in BC3

[gjaros]

Forgive me if I've just overlooked this, but has BC3 lost the ability to have edited text in files changed color? In BC2 edited text would be highlighted yellow. In BC3 there is only a small yellow indicator in the gutter. All the text it white. I'm going to miss being able to quickly scan my files and see what has been edited.

[Chris]

BC3 will only display the yellow indicator in the gutter. It is possible to change the color of the indicator or make it larger.

To change the color, select Tools > Options. Go to the File Views > Display Section. Select "Gutter". Change the "Edited" color.

To make the edited indicator larger, hit Ctrl+Shift+T to open the Tweaks dialog. Go to the Text Editors tab. Check "Wider change bars".

[Michael Bulgrien]

To answer the why question... BC2 performed a static compare. Since edited text was not automatically recompared, changes were simply highlighted to indicate that something had changed. BC3 performs a dynamic re-compare. In other words, as you make changes, BC3 automatically adjusts the background color according to content (light red if there are important differences, light blue if there are only unimportant differences, and white if a change makes both sides the same - or similar if you are ignoring unimportant differences).

The wider change bars tweak is a pretty nice compromise. It does not make the gutter any wider... it simply extends the yellow shading over the line number column.

[KevinFSI]

Thanks for posting that information Michael. I gotta say, I don't care for the style of edited text in BC3 at all. It makes it much harder to scroll through and quickly see the edits.

What I don't get about your explanation is, how can they show that something has been edited with an indicator in the gutter, but not in the main window? BC2 with yellow background, green text, and italic font...now that was good stuff.

[Zoë]

Kevin,

It's not a technical limitation, it's a stylistic choice we made. As Michael said, BC3 recompares the text when you make changes, and we want to background to reflect what the current comparison results are. If we colored the whole thing yellow it wouldn't be able to do that.

The other way to quickly find your edits is to use the "Next/Previous Edit" commands in the "Search" menu. They don't have a keyboard shortcut by default, but you can assign one using Tools->Customize Commands.