In order to efficiently use formatting of projects with several developers, it is important to be able to only format files which have changed. Jalopy provides a simple way to accomplish this by calculating checksums. This stops formatting files that have just been updated from source control from having being formatted (and time stamps updated) and thus prevents checking-in files that actually weren’t touched by the developer later on.

To enable the history feature, select your preferred checksum method from the combo box on the left. Adler32 is faster, CRC32 is slightly more accurate. The history information of previous formatting runs will be saved in a file “history.dat”. Since Jalopy 1.0.3, you can specify the directory where the file is actually stored. The default is to store the history file in the current profile directory. The history file will grow over time, especially if one manages several big projects which share the same profile. As all history entries are read into memory at startup, it could eat up quite a bit of resources. Therefore a simple history viewer is provided which enables you to selectively remove obsolete entries if need be.

View

You can use the View button to display the history viewer. Entries can be selectively removed via the pop-up menu.

Directory

To change the directory where the history data is stored, press the Choose... button. A dialog appears that lets you enter a new directory or—in case the history directory was already changed—select one from out of the last ten chosen history directories.

Figure 2.16. Choose history directory

Either enter a directory in the text field directly, or press the Browse... button to invoke a directory browser that lets you search the file system for an existing folder or create a new one.

Since 1.0.3