Improvements to the Script Editor’s Diff Tool

[Ukendio (Marcus)]

Git operates at the file level, in which the upcoming feature “export to files” announced at rdc could allow for. But this diff tool is realistically the only thing that the script editor can offer in terms of version control unless they make a huge paradigm shift and realize that the push to the cloud and reinventing everything is naive.

[DeathToTheStadium (ROBLOXTUTOR_YT)]

While your at it make it so we can have documentation please

[Coasterteam]

Thank you for this change! Always love seeing work being put into the scripting side of things.

[lolmanurfunny (lolman)]

@Ukendio

the push to the cloud and reinventing everything is naive.

So, in other words: SaaS + NIH = Roblox™

[GenericsAccount]

Is it possible to copy the diff as HTML? Can’t check because I don’t have it yet.

Copy script diff as HTML

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to copy script diffs from studio. If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because when I need help from the DevForum for an issue introduced after an update, people could differentiate the changes that I’ve made more easily. (with the <ins> and <del> tag)

[mooonc0w (Sauron)]

Do you have plans to add Bookmarks to the Script editor?

[TesSkill67]

It sounds like a good tool to have especially if you are working in a team, but I’m thoroughly confused on where and how to start using this tool. Maybe a documentation or a short video on how to start would help.

[DarthChadius]

This is a massive improvement! Thanks you!!

[Place_Reboot (Place)]

This is great, I’ve been using view script history so often this day making this a very essential powertool! I do hope the current weird issue with the script history browser is fixed though, mine for some reason scrolls down by itself when I click on a version (Hard to notice at times)

[DeathToTheStadium (ROBLOXTUTOR_YT)]

Honestly a smart move would be to allow roblox developers to integrate other services like github directly in to the editor with this functionality it would rival other engines like unreal godot unity scratch and everything else

you would also make visual studio code a very unnatractive approach and keep your developers on platform

[Bettercat4 (Lynxmountain)]

Its nice that this is finally fixed/revamped, cause the diffs were basically useless before due to the lack of proper selection. You could just see non-updated code without being able to move it to the script unless you opened the diff in a text editor. Good update

[idevride]

Thank you! We have Script Version History on the list as well!

[idevride]

Likely this will become possible once we create a Script Diff API. We added this request to our requested features list.

[redmiint8 (AmySchumer)]

I think these changes are great, but unless there’s a new option I’m unaware of, differences between different scripts each opening in separate tabs has been frustrating to work with. Very often I commit scripts in mass as I typically leave them all as drafts till I’m ready to do live testing with them and have tested changes I made on my own first.

The old differences tab made this very convenient as I’d have all of them presented to me in a single screen that I was able to continually scroll through to do a final review of things to make sure I didn’t leave any temporary test code in the scripts or as a catch for any errors I may have not noticed before. This process has become more slower and tedious having the tabs open separately, especially if there’s a handful of script changes that only alter no more than a few lines.

[idevride]

Hi @redmiint8,

Thank you for raising this issue. We went with the standard desktop solution (like VSCode, Beyond Compare, Araxis, etc) to declutter the individual diffs and make it easier to view and navigate diff contexts.

However you raise a good point and I’ll bring this to the attention of our designers. We might need to think about how to better manage tabs (tab groups? colors?) or perhaps prefilter the diffs to only open pairs of scripts that are different.

[Usering]

Any time I make small changes in the middle of a larger script, my diffs end up with endless empty new & removed lines. This makes reading any diff incredibly difficult, and has been an issue with this tool for years.

Most of the time I have to resort to checking script diffs using a website such as diffchecker.com
Here’s an example of a diff from the same script, showing only the 12 lines I changed.

Here’s a thread I made back in 2021 with some diff checking feature requests:

Script version improvements

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to read changes between two versions of the same script. I have two main requests here: 1. View the whole script, with everywhere a change was made being visualized in-line The problem here is it is next to impossible to gauge the context of what changes you’re looking at. Here is an example of a change I was just looking at within Robloxian High School. [image] For the simple one-line changes, it makes sense. Yes, I can see that variables we…

[Bulldo344 (LawMixer)]

Hey, sorry for the bump, but there’s some really good feedback in here and it went along very well with the feedback/question I have.

Do we know if this will support OpenCloud eventually? A connecting question of mine is, could we include webhooks when commited a new script (and etc)?

[idevride]

Sorry for the late reply, I didn’t set my thread tracking settings correctly…

I think both of these are worthy feature requests. For the webhooks and OpenCloud, there is a long term workstream that should make that happen, but we have no ETA on that one.

[idevride]

@Usering ,

Sorry for the late response, would you mind filing a bug on this one for better visibility?

Thank you!