Allow granular diffs when pasting external edits into a Branch#229

Pasting a full document into a Branch currently breaks the Diff viewer (it shows basically “Delete All / Add All” instead of specific changes). That is, if I take a doc, edit it on my own machine, and want to paste it back in for edits.

Would it be possible to have a content-based diff check (like Git) for full-text pastes so we can review external edits line-by-line during a merge? Totally fine as a “Import to Branch” feature.

If this is already possible, let me know!

Can you give some context? Why are you editing it outside of ButterDocs and not directly in the branch?

I prefer doing heavy drafting and editing in my local environment (for speed and focus), especially for certain technical docs, but then I’d love to collab on butterdocs (and get version control and merging).

This feature would be powerful in my view because it would allow butterdocs to become the central hub for all edits, even when I need to incorporate changes from contributors who don’t use the platform (and won’t) and simply send me files.

I agree that this would be useful, but we track changes in a way that allows us to also identify moved text (not tracking as del/ins separately), and adding a second diffing algo on top of that for external pasted updates would be a huge lift. Could happen in the future, but not anytime soon, unfortunately. I do recommend focus mode, it’s a very nice/productive writing environment.

I feel like this might be over-complicating the solution here.

For a specific ‘Import’ mechanism, I wouldn’t need your engine to retroactively guess moved text. I would be perfectly happy if you used standard, open-source diffing algorithms (like diff-match-patch) to simply resolve the text comparison into a very basic set of edits. Losing full/correct ‘moved text’ attribution on an import is a fair trade-off, showing the entire document as deleted/replaced is not.

I don’t think focus mode covers any of my use-cases (my local editing env, or external contributors), but maybe it’s useful for others.