The Diff Review window

The right-hand column is a third of the window. For a change worth reading properly, the button at the end of the diff header opens the same diff in a window of its own, at whatever size you give it — and side by side rather than inline, which is the other half of what the window is for.

The Diff Review window shows more than the working copy. It is where Innesta puts every diff that is not simply “this file, right now”:

• the working copy, the same thing the column shows;
• a commit, and any file in it — with the same parent picker a merge carries in the main window;
• a comparison between two commits, or between a commit and its parent, or between a commit and HEAD;
• a stash — the files a saved stash holds, listed under Stash Files, and the diff of any one of them;
• a discarded-changes backup from Recovery, the same way, under Discarded Change Files;
• an operation preview — what an operation is about to do, before it does it.

Previews are diffs

That last one is the reason the window matters more than a bigger diff would suggest. Innesta previews destructive and remote operations as diffs in this window, so the question “what is this about to change?” always has the same answer in the same shape:

• pull and push — the files that would move;
• force push — what the remote would lose;
• stash, discard and hard reset — what would leave your working copy;
• delete branch — the commits at risk.

Reading a preview is the same skill as reading any other diff, which is the point of showing it as one.