Exclude files from VC view if changes are whitespace-only

Applications
1

Hi and thanks for this cool piece of software!

I was wondering if it is possible to not show a file in the VC file view at all, if all of the file’s changes are whitespace-only (which should include adding or removing blank lines). This would be a great way to reduce the clutter when reviewing huge changesets which include lots of whitespace changes.

Thanks in advance and best regards,
Jörg

2

This is already supported in meld using Trim blank line option in Preferences.

meld-ignore-space
meld-ignore-space634×741 40.9 KB

3

Thanks for answering - let me try an example: Imagine a situation with 1000 files that differ, but 900 of them only have differences in whitespace and you’re interested only in the significant changes. Even with meld configured as shown, all 1000 files will be shown in the list of differing files. When opening one of the files having only whitespace differences, the diff window will show no differences - as configured. But it would be great if these files didn’t even show up in the list in the first place. Is there a way to do that?

4

This isn’t currently possible in version control view, and it’s not likely that it would be added as a feature. Version control view very much trusts the underlying version control system to tell it about file status. In theory it would be possible to do some post-VC filtering, but there’s currently no support for that at all.

The best alternative I can think of is to use the default git difftool config that creates a temporary folder and launches Meld to compare the current repo state to the temp folder; this means that you get a folder comparison instead of a version control comparison, which means that text filters + blank line trimming will work.