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

CVS/SVN?

[Jonah Hex]

I understand you want an all-in-one, however I believe that most "programming" editors can hook into some sort of change management program. I use one locally with my AutoIT3 scripts and the SCiTE editor, every time I compile it asks me for a "changes/reason" and enters that into my own local source management.

SCiTE

SCiTE for AutoIT with screenshots

CVS/SVN wrapper for SCiTE with screenshots and instructions

Jonah HEX

Re:Version control

[Shaitan Apistos]

Some editors, netbeans for example, even have visual cues in the margin indicating what you've changed from the svn revision you've checked out since your last commit.

Um, Eclipse?

[Progman3K]

I seem to recall Eclipse saves your edit history

Emacs - ~/.saves directory

[JBrow]

Aside from using version control, I also have Emacs set up with an extensive save history. My settings are:

; backup
(setq make-backup-files t)
(setq
backup-by-copying t
backup-directory-alist '(("." . "~/.saves"))
delete-old-versions t
kept-new-versions 6
kept-old-versions 2
version-control t)