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The small markers beside a row, a tree node or a line say what happened to the item they sit next to, and what a merge has since done about it. This topic describes every one of them. It is not about the commands: those carry labels, and there is nothing to look up.
The five summary states are new, modified, deleted, renamed-unchanged and renamed-modified. Each has a distinct colour and shape. The renamed-and-modified fill is the renamed lavender carried half way towards your Modified highlight, which is what the state is; recolour Modified and it moves with it.
Shape carries the meaning; colour only reinforces it. Every marker is a small disc with a glyph drawn on it, and the glyph alone is enough to tell the states apart: a plus was added, a cross was removed, two bars means the item exists on both sides but differs, a diagonal stroke means a merge has undone the change. The change colours are yours to configure (Options ▸ Appearance), and a reader who cannot distinguish two of them, or who has recoloured them beyond recognition, can still read the compare. The markers are drawn at run time rather than loaded from image files, so they stay sharp at any display scaling, and they carry their own contrast in both the light and the dark theme.
Summary markers
These appear on each row of a Compare Summary, describing a whole file or a whole library entry.
| Marker | State | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| green disc, plus | New | The file exists in New and not in Old. Nothing to compare; the whole file is the change. |
| amber disc, two bars | Modified | The file exists on both sides and differs. This is the row to drill into. |
| red disc, diagonal cross | Deleted | The file exists in Old and not in New. |
| lavender disc, arrow | Renamed, unchanged | A pair you paired by hand in Comparing renamed files. The two are the same object under two names. The row shows both names. |
| lavender-and-amber disc, arrow with a bar | Renamed, modified | A hand-paired rename whose two sides also differ. The row shows both names, and drilling in shows the differences rather than a whole file added and a whole file removed. |
A file that exists on both sides with no differences is Unchanged and carries no marker. Unchanged rows are hidden while Only Changed Items is on.
Compare and merge markers
These appear on the hierarchy tree nodes, in the gutter beside script lines, and on the icon rails of a three-way merge. A tree node's marker aggregates its children, so a control whose event changed is itself shown as modified.
The three restored states are what a merge has decided. You reach them from a File Compare with Take Old Version, and in a three-way merge by taking a side or keeping the Base; see Merging.
The table below pairs each compare state with the merge state that undoes it: New with New Removed, Modified with Modified Restored, and Deleted with Deleted Restored. A seventh state, Edited, completes the table. A merge state keeps the shape of the state it came from, loses its saturation, and gains a thin diagonal stroke across the disc, so the marker still says "this was a deletion" while also saying "and I have undone it".
| Marker | State | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| green disc, plus | New | The line or script was added in New. It is not in Old. |
| pale green plus, diagonal stroke | New Removed | A new line or script that the merge will remove, because you chose not to carry the addition over. |
| amber disc, two bars | Modified | The line or script exists on both sides and differs. |
| pale amber bars, diagonal stroke | Modified Restored | A modified line or script that the merge has put back to its old version. |
| red disc, diagonal cross | Deleted | The line or script was removed in New. |
| pale red cross, diagonal stroke | Deleted Restored | A deleted line or script that the merge has restored. In a two-way merge, take the old version. In a three-way merge, take the side that still has the line or keep the Base. See Merging. |
| blue disc, pencil stroke | Edited | The merged text was typed by hand, or was inserted by Auto Merge in a three-way merge. In the three-way Base pane an edited insertion also carries an edited background, so you can see at a glance which parts of the merged file were not copied straight from one side. |
Line highlighting
Lines in the script panes are shaded as well as marked in the gutter. Five colours are involved, all configurable under Appearance:
| Role | Applied to |
|---|---|
| New | Lines present on the new side only. |
| Modified | Lines present on both sides that differ. Within such a line, the characters or tokens that actually changed are marked more strongly, and optionally underlined or struck through. |
| Deleted | Lines present on the old side only. |
| Empty | The filler on the side that has no line at all, opposite an addition or a deletion. It is padding, not content. |
| Excluded | Text an option removed from the comparison. A line whose two sides differ only in ways Ignore whitespace was told to pass over is shaded this way: it counts as unchanged, because that is what the option means, and the shading says it was passed over rather than that the two sides agreed. Both versions are still shown, one on each side. |
Change highlighting composes over syntax colouring: the change state is carried by the background and the gutter marker, the token class by the text colour.
The change minimap
The strip down the right edge of a compare uses the same three change colours, in three lanes: deletions on the left of the strip, modifications in the middle, additions on the right. The lane carries the meaning there, for the same reason the shape does elsewhere: a mark four pixels wide cannot be told apart by hue alone, so the marks are pushed towards or away from the backdrop until they are visible whatever colours you chose.