Attempts to improve the usability of version control for Cycling74 Max patch files by filtering the diff output to leave only the semantically meaningful parts.
The Perl-script diffmaxmunge.pl filters the Max patch json file format and removes everything that's not about the definition of objects in the patch (visual appearance, layout, bookkeeping data).
Usually, only the object text and class remain, and all the connections at the end (which are impossible to make sense of for a human).
The shell command diffmax -m <file1> <file2> can be used as a replacement for diff, filtering the two files through diffmaxmunge.pl.
This is a ridiculously brute force attempt to get a human-readable idea of what changed in a patch. It is not even parsing the json! I put this up to provoke a proper solution...
Of course this also does not make it possible to merge two files. It is still inevitable to do this by hand in Max, but at least, one can now see quickly what changed semantically. (However, we can't know in which subpatch, because of the stupidity of this approach, the filtered diff output has lost the subpatch hierarchy.)
- in local or global
.gitconfig, add:
[diff "max"]
textconv = <absolute executable path>/diffmaxmunge.pl
- in local
.gitattributes, add
*.maxpat diff=max
*.maxhelp diff=max
*.amxd -text diff=max
- one line:
cat >>.gitattributes <<END
*.maxpat diff=max
*.maxhelp diff=max
*.amxd -text diff=max
END