ANN/RFC: extension that shows evolution of a range of lines in a file

[Benjamin Pollack]

On Apr 14, 2010, at 4:04 PM, Peter Arrenbrecht wrote:
> 
> Hmm. Maybe if we made this thing interactive, we could get closer to
> your dream. At least if your favourite editor can launch an external
> tool with the required line numbers / file offsets for the current
> selection. This might also solve the problem of which parent to follow
> as you'd simply choose that interactively.
> 
> And integrations like MercurialEclipse could do it directly in the
> IDE, of course.

I'd also point out that Kiln has a very similar feature already: when viewing a file or diff, if you click the disclosure triangle next to the line you're interested in, it will show you the history of that line back in time, tracking its movement around the file.  It's not perfect, but it ends up working pretty well most of the time.  The logic's quite similar to your patch, though simpler, since we're only doing one line, not a range.

The next logical step, of course, would be tracking a function/struct/class/symbol's history back in time, but neither Kiln nor Mercurial do that.  Yet.

--Benjamin