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Meld, a GUI tool for diffing, in the Age of ChatGPT

This article was translated into English by ChatGPT. The original post is here.

Convenient ChatGPT

It goes without saying that ChatGPT is incredibly useful, particularly for correcting Japanese text, English text, and code. I was good at Japanese literature during my student days, but I think ChatGPT surpasses my Japanese ability by a wide margin. In fact, I think that ChatGPT is better at Japanese than most Japanese people, except for those who make a living writing in Japanese.

Want to see the differences in the Japanese corrected by ChatGPT

Now, let's have ChatGPT correct our text.
Let's have ChatGPT correct the text we wrote earlier.

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Can you see the differences?

Even if ChatGPT corrects text, it's often difficult to quickly see where the corrections were made just by looking at it. Japanese is relatively easy to spot differences in, but it's harder with English or code (for native Japanese speakers). In these cases, it's convenient to use a tool called meld.

Meld

Meld is a GUI tool for showing differences, developed in Python and GTK. It is a rarity in that it is a full-featured GUI tool developed in Python. It is a standard tool for Linux users and is also available for Windows and Mac. It is likely that there are other powerful software options for Windows and Mac, but for Linux, meld is the most user-friendly.

Natural language text often does not have line breaks between paragraphs, making it difficult to compare differences.

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To alleviate this, it is helpful to enable line wrapping in the settings.

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It's especially useful when working with natural language text as there are often no line breaks between paragraphs.

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This makes it easier to see the differences in Japanese text. When comparing the original text, it is clear that the revised text is properly written. I am not good at Japanese. Japanese is difficult for me...

The line wrapping feature can sometimes be inconvenient when correcting code, so it's best to switch it on and off as needed.

Thank you for reading. This article was translated by ChatGPT (because ChatGPT is much better at English than I am).

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