Programmer's File Editor With Change Tracking?

passionfingers writes "My business users regularly have to tweak large (>32MB text) data files manually. Overlords charged with verifying the aforementioned changes have requested that the little people be provided with a new file editor that will track changes made to a file (as a word processor does). I have scouted around online for such an animal, but to no avail — even commercial offerings like UltraEdit32 don't offer such a feature. Likewise on the OSS side of the fence, where I expected a Notepad++ plugin or the like, it appears that the requirements to a) open a file containing a large volume of text data and b) track changes to the data, are mutually exclusive. Does anyone in the Slashdot community already have such a beast in their menagerie? Perhaps there is there a commercial offering I've missed, or could someone possibly point me to their favorite (stable) OSS project that might measure up?"

Comments

diff

[Anonymous Coward]

I just wrote one for you, and it is even using your favorite editor:
cp $1 $1.bak
`$EDITOR $1`
diff $1.bak $1

Re:Version control

[markov_chain]

You must switch to version control, urgently!

Re:change the process

[DragonTHC]

come to think of it, it sounds like you're asking us how to best manage spam hit lists.

Re:vi/emacs/eclipse/whatever + svn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, there's no way I'd switch from vi, even if it meant better integrated version control. Of course, I'm sure that Emacs has an SVN server built in ;)

Re:AskSlashdot: "Please Do My Work For Me"

[Anonymous Coward]

> cpmsoders

I think you need to move your keyboard about this much (___) to the left. The scary thing is it made perfect sense!

Re:AskSlashdot: "Please Do My Work For Me"

[somersault]

Oops! That's quite imcjaracjterostoc of me... my apologies.

Re:That's not fair

[spazdor]

their domain name used to be "expertsexchange.com".
Then one day that address suddenly redirected to "experts-exchange.com" You could almost feel the webmasters smacking themselves in the forehead.

Re:AskSlashdot: "Please Do My Work For Me"

[Anonymous Coward]

v[,dpfrtd?
b].f[gtyh?
xonaiswea?
zib UAQW?

I am losing it!!

Re:AskSlashdot: "Please Do My Work For Me"

[ianare]

well considering many of us here are at work, we are getting paid for it.

Re:That's not fair

[wilder_card]

I've got a list of "worst URLS" around somewhere that's got expertsexchange.com on it. Other memorable entries included an artist's site, speedofart.com, and the Mole Station Nursery, a wildlife non-profit, at molestationnursery.com.

Re:That's not fair

[spazdor]

http://burntherapist.com/

Re:That's not fair

[A440Hz]

Don't forget-- the company Pen Island decided to use their name (without dashes) as their URL. Capitalization being rare in URLs, it didn't work so well.

Re:AskSlashdot: "Please Do My Work For Me"

[tickticker]

Then don't post, oh phallic one

Re:That's not fair

[hotdiggitydawg]

Neither did the URL for the Italian branch of a multinational energy company: "PowerGen Italia"...

Nah...

[wondershit]

...a shingle is just fine.

Re:rent a geek

[Hotawa Hawk-eye]

3) Is under the impression that revision history could conceivably be hidden within said plain text file, implying the OP doesn't understand basic file formats, which confirms that he is not merely the wrong person but absolutely the last person you want manually mucking with your data files.

Revision history can't be hidden within a plain text file?

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
This is a \LaTeX document. It can have comments in it.
% Here is a comment that will not be present in the LaTeX document output. The revision history could be stored here.
\end{document}