IdeaSift

Developers miss line-ending changes that can distort files and diffs

Developers working across platforms or with legacy files can miss mixed, unusual, or changed line endings because editors and diff views may hide them or normalize them on save. The result can be unexpectedly huge Git diffs, broken file behavior, or changes that are difficult to review. Existing workarounds include switching editors or using separate command-line tools, rather than catching the problem in the editing and staging workflow.

For software developers working across platforms and legacy repositories. Mentioned from Nov 2015 to Dec 2021 on GitHub.

17 different people described this problem in 8 separate discussions.

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0 mentions in the last 12 weeks
Indie fit
2.0/10
Pain
5.3/10
Frequency
10.0/10
Willingness to pay
0.0/10
Momentum
5.0/10
Who pays
Professionals
Competition
Medium
Build difficulty
Medium

What people said

Quoted word for word. Follow a link to read the whole discussion.

  1. The Stage Selected ranged option changes line endings which without diff showing line-ending changes makes it a hard issue to spot ahead of realising gitblame is saying you edited every single line in a file you barely edited
  2. Because of this, I've found myself bitten by large diffs in Git (I'm aware you can circumvent this using the -w flag) where a trivial fix to a single line of source code appears to affect a significant proportion of the file, which makes pull requests and reviews for such changes on GitHub a pain to sift through
Build brief

See what to build and who will buy it

  • 2 product ideas with the smallest useful version and pricing
  • 4 places to find your first customers
  • 17 more quotes from people who have this problem
  • Current workarounds, existing solutions and risks