Word wrap in file view of text-possible?

[puppylover42]

hello aaron / chris ... i used BC many years ago at a previous employer... my current employer just purchased licenses for us... while using it on some scripts, i wanted to check if BC was now word-wrap capable... this was a much asked for feature 7-8 years back, and was put on the so-called "wish list".

i was shocked to find that after 8 years, it is still a pipe dream. so what happened? was this something that you couldn't figure out in 8 years? or are there not enough people who want to see this feature implemented? or do you have some new feature / workaround ??

[Aaron]

Hello,

We have been pretty busy bringing BC4 over to a new platform (with new features: http://www.scootersoftware.com/beta....beta4_whatsnew), as well as all of the bug fixes and enhancements that can be found in BC3:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/ChangeLog.txt

Wrapping text is still definitely on our radar, but hasn't been something we've been able to schedule out and tackle yet.

[pmillikin]

want word-wrap

Consider me one of the people who want to see this feature implemented. I'm positive there are many others. Painfully comparing a 1600 character-long lined document. Notepad has Word Wrap, is it really that difficult to fit a line within an amount of visual space, in 2014 AD? I'm not surprised we don't all have flying cars, but really no Word Wrap? Visual Studio has a nifty little curly arrow to show which lines are Word-Wrap'd, perhaps some graphical tidbit like this is the key to the complicated situation. Please remove from radar, schedule out, and tackle, thanks.

[Mike]

I was just trying to find this feature in Beyond Compare, and a web search for how to Word Wrap led me here. I must admit, with all the great stuff that BC does I was quite surprised that it doesn't have this yet, so add me to the list of those patiently waiting for it

[nikolaus]

It would be nice to have either the ability to word wrap or the ability to compare without regard for line endings - I tried wrapping a file myself before comparing, but then of course the lines wrap at different points so it looks like there are tons of changes.

BC4 is still head and shoulders above all the other compare tools (and trust me, I tried every single one I could get my hands on before BC4 was released for OS X), but at one of these two features would be killer.

Thanks for the great product!

[Aaron]

Thanks, nikolaus. Comparing across line breaks is on our wishlist, but for now you'd need to use an external conversion process to tidy the file, similar to our extra downloads for XML or HTML to normalize whitespace or line breaks.

[LonelyPixel]

Please count me in to the word wrap wanters. I use BC to upload my website and I use word/line wrapping in every source editor. So I can just type longer text paragraphs in one row without caring about placing line breaks that will be out of place when I edit the text. It's just like in a word processor (MS Word) where the application does the layouting for you. And the browser will even do hyphenating on my web page...

So whenever I see a differing file, I just check to see what I'm uploading (and whether it might be an experimental thing I want to keep local). If the difference is somewhere in the 100th word in the line, I don't see it in BC without scrolling. And even with scrolling, you just won't see much. It's like looking through glasses with a tiny viewing slot like they had a hundred years ago... ;-)

So now that version 4 is there, could you please move this a bit further up on your todo list? I think I have no other wishes at the moment. :-)

[Aaron]

Hello,

With version 4.0 launched, we're pretty busy squashing the early bug reports.

But this is still on our radar and I'll add your notes to our wishlist entry on the subject.

[mindstream]

Please add me to the chorus of users who feels that word-wrap and comparisons ignoring line-breaks is a necessary feature. I have been a Beyond Compare user since Version 2 and it has surprised me that it has never been bumped to a higher priority.

I interact with a lot of programers and technical writers who I have been hesitant to recommend BC4 to without this feature. Despite BC's superior features in every other realm, I have had to recommend WinMerge to these users for simple text comparison.

[Rando]

Today I searched desperately to wrap my text then I found this thread.

I can't believe that there is no wordwrap in beyond compare.
People started asking it 6 years ago.

[Aaron]

We're sorry we haven't been able to tackle this one. Due to how Beyond Compare compares lines within text files, adding the ability to wrap the view or compare across line breaks has been a challenging issue. It's still on our radar as something we would like to do, but haven't been able to implement it.

As a workaround for viewing, I'm not sure if you found it earlier in the thread, but if you generate a Text-Report as .html, the .html file can then be viewed with wrapped text.

[Diakun]

Hi Scooter Team, I recently purchased the full package and I do like to add to the list of users hat would like a line wrap text wrap feature to turn on as scrolling to compare, is very very painful, thanks for any consideration in bumping hte priority on this feature

We're sorry we haven't been able to tackle this one. Due to how Beyond Compare compares lines within text files, adding the ability to wrap the view or compare across line breaks has been a challenging issue. It's still on our radar as something we would like to do, but haven't been able to implement it.

As a workaround for viewing, I'm not sure if you found it earlier in the thread, but if you generate a Text-Report as .html, the .html file can then be viewed with wrapped text.

[bobm]

We're sorry we haven't been able to tackle this one. Due to how Beyond Compare compares lines within text files, adding the ability to wrap the view or compare across line breaks has been a challenging issue. It's still on our radar as something we would like to do, but haven't been able to implement it.

As a workaround for viewing, I'm not sure if you found it earlier in the thread, but if you generate a Text-Report as .html, the .html file can then be viewed with wrapped text.

Almost 10 years and still no adequate response to customer requirements for line wrapping?!?
Presumably this is a display issue rather than a comparison issue, so why the inordinate delay?
(Comparison across line breaks appears to be a separate issue which may well be harder to implement).
Where exactly is it on your radar - are we talking about another 10 years?
Which version of BC will contain line wrapping?
Where do your customers find the current ranked list of planned enhancements?

Please add me as another customer waiting for this very useful functionality.

[Aaron]

Hello Bob,

Thanks for the feedback. You are correct that comparing across line breaks and allowing wrapping are two separate issues, but neither is trivial to implement. One of Beyond Compare's features is the ability to display very large files as they load, and to load the compare quickly. Line wrapping is something we definitely would like to tackle, but we need to find a strong solution that does not sacrifice our current feature set.

[Chris224]

I am the next one who has got word wrapping problem and I've found this thread.
Pleaseeeeeeee implement this feature