| # Interpreting The Information In The Input Windows

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## Interpreting The Information In The Input Windows

At the top of each text window is its "info line". The info lines of the input windows contain a letter "A", "B" or "C", the filename and the line number of the first visible line in the window. (Note that window "C" is optional.) Each info line appears in a different color. (If the paths are too long to fit, then you can move the mouse onto the info line and a tooltip will show the complete name.)

The three input windows are assigned the letters "A", "B" and "C". "A" has color blue, "B" has green and "C" has magenta. (These are the defaults, but can be changed in the Settings-Menu.)

When a difference is detected then the color shows which input file differs. When both other input files differ then the color used to express this is red by default ("Conflict color" in the Settings). This colorscheme is especially useful in the case of three input files, which will be seen in the next section (Merging).

Left of each text is the "summary column". If differences occurred on a line then the summary column shows the respective color. For a white-space-only difference the summary is chequered. For programming languages where white space is not so important this is useful to see at one glance if anything of importance was modified. (In C/C++ white space is only interesting within strings, comments, for the preprocessor, and some only very esoteric situations.)

The vertical line separating the summary column and the text is interrupted if the input file had no lines there. When word-wrap is enabled then this vertical line appears dotted for wrapped lines.

On the right side a "overview"-column is visible left of the vertical scrollbar. It shows the compressed summary column of input "A". All the differences and conflicts are visible at one glance. When only two input windows are used, then all differences appear red here because every difference is also a conflict. A black rectangle frames the visible part of the inputs. For very long input files, when the number of input lines is bigger than the height of the overview column in pixels, then several input lines share one overview line. A conflict then has top priority over simple differences, which have priority over no change, so that no difference or conflict is lost here. By clicking into this overview column the corresponding text will be shown.