Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Editing/Better diff handling of paragraph splits/Proposal

  • Problem: When an editor adds line breaks to split an existing paragraph, our diff viewer depicts the text as deleted and re-added rather than just repurposed. This makes it difficult to see what text changed between the two paragraphs.
  • Proposed solution: Directly compare the text changes between the "deleted" text and the new paragraphs, similar to how this handled moved paragraphs. In other words: diff ranks the line break much too high. It should rank it maybe like white space and rank resynchronization higher. Moreover, the differing characters could be shown more pronouncedly and the numbers of characters and their difference shown very similar to the Revision history.
  • Who would benefit: Editors and diff readers (fairly common type of edit)
  • More comments: This is a perennial request with continued need. It ranked #9 last year (score) and appeared in the 2019 and 2016 (#13) wishlists.
  • Phabricator tickets: task T156439, task T7072
  • Proposer: czar 23:09, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]