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I think strikeout of deleted fragments should be removed in colored diff output (at least when old and new version are displayed separately).

With strikeout:

enter image description here

Without strikeout:

enter image description here

I think it's easier to understand what's going on when you look at the second image. It there a chance to change this behaviour?

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True, the strikeouts of the asterisks look like underlines in the screen capture above. But for regular words, such as "andoid_id" and "VALUE" above, I think the strikeout helps. So: I think it's just fine. –  Arjan Dec 1 '12 at 17:49
Something like <s>I-</s> doesn't work well too. And there are many edits with whitespace correction, and strikeout of whitespaces looks very confusing. –  Riateche Dec 1 '12 at 17:52
I find strikeouts really helpful, especially in whitespace. –  Emil Vikström Dec 1 '12 at 17:57

2 Answers 2

up vote 11 down vote accepted

I find strikeouts helpful because they make it easy to focus on the parts that are still left. Especially in whitespace the color is not enough to help me see indentation differences in code; I like the added visual clues by the strikeout.

I've looked at your example picture and my head wants to see the second example as text added, not removed, even though I see the red color. I don't know why that is but I suspect it is because I can see the text clearly and so just reads it as normal text.

Also note that there are a lot of color blind people out there. Green and red are commonly hard to distinguish. From the Wikipedia article:

Protanopia, deuteranopia, protanomaly, and deuteranomaly are widely common inherited colour blindness that affects a substantial portion of the human population, in which those affected have difficulty with discriminating red and green hues due to the absence of the red or green retinal photoreceptors, respectively.

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For the reasons Emil states this should be left alone, however there is a way you can achieve this affect yourself using custom CSS in your browser:

span.diff-delete { text-decoration: none !important }

Add this to your custom CSS and apply it to the Stack Overflow domain (and any other SE sites) and it will override the current text-decoration: line-through and you won't see the strike-out effect when you browse through the revision histories. :)

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