Feature Request: Colorize Diffs in Replies

[ericwmackay]

A frequent use case in looking at code diffs in emails is that you're looking at a reply, not the original email text. In the case of LKML, and other mailing lists with similar style requirements, each line of the previous email in the thread is prepended with "> ". This seems to confuse the diff regex, so all those reply lines are ignored.

Example (the code isn't important):

> ---
>  hw/arm/smmuv3.c | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>  hw/arm/virt.c   |  3 ++-
>  2 files changed, 28 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/hw/arm/smmuv3.c b/hw/arm/smmuv3.c
> index ab67972353..605de9b721 100644
> --- a/hw/arm/smmuv3.c
> +++ b/hw/arm/smmuv3.c
> @@ -24,6 +24,7 @@
>  #include "hw/qdev-properties.h"
>  #include "hw/qdev-core.h"
>  #include "hw/pci/pci.h"
> +#include "hw/pci/pci_bridge.h"
> +static int smmuv3_pcie_bus(Object *obj, void *opaque)
> +{
> +    DeviceState *d = opaque;

I've tried playing around with the regexes in scripts/content.js:hasDiff() (not even sure if this is the right spot) but haven't found anything that works yet.

Figured this might be a helpful feature for others as well.

[Qeole]

Hi, and thanks for the report.

I don't see any trivial way to add colours to quoted replies. The way the add-on currently works is that we look for diffs with the function you found, hasDiff(), and when we find one, we inject the script from highlight.js. Then, this is highlight.js doing the colouring for us.

Which means that in the case of a reply, we could adjust the function to identify a diff from quoted replies, but in that case the highlight.js script would attempt to colour the whole block - quotation marker included - as a diff, and would likely fail, because of course it's not a diff, only the inner text excluding quotation markers would be.

So we'd have to do something like parsing quoted text to identify diffs, then extract these snippets from the quotation mark, pass them to highlight.js somehow, then replace the initial quote with the quoted text. And inline replies would likely make this even harder to do properly. It's probably doable, but requires more time than I can afford to spend on this add-on at the moment.

[ericwmackay]

Thanks for taking a look. That's a shame. I'll share if I happen to get something working

[roseoriorden]

+1 for interest in this feature. I just came here to open an issue and saw this. I love this extension but most of the time I'm looking at replies with inline comments. I also might spend some time looking into this and I'll share if it works out.