Introducing Text Fragment Comparator
Do you ever have tired eyes? After hours of editing or coding, it can get tricky to spot subtle, or not-so-subtle, differences in blocks of text.
This was a particular problem during the creation of MOUSE. Matters got out of hand, and ChatGPT/Gemini wanted me to patch code. I wasn’t always sure when fragments of code could be replaced or just amended. Ideally, I wanted to just replace, but what had the AI changed?
Operating systems like UNIX provide comparison utilities: diff, cmp, comm, and sdiff. Almost too many options. I was developing on iPad. Then I thought: ChatGPT could write an app for that. So I asked it, and here it is.
Given two fragments of text, A and B, the tool identifies what’s in A but not B etc. You can compare on the basis of lines, words, and sentences. Sentence detection isn’t sophisticated. It looks for periods, plings etc. It’s a place to start, and it might be enough.