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#51 line highlighting doesn't honour ignore-whitespace-changes flag properly
With the ignore-blanks option set, and with -bwB as the relevant diff flags, tkdiff correctly identifies differences line-by-line; however, on a line where there are relevant and irrelevant differences, the highlighting shows both differences.
You are correct - but this is a misunderstanding - not a bug.
The ability to specify parameters regarding the status of blanks is simply because TkDiff is designed to invoke an external "differencing engine" and thus needs to know which parameters to pass to it. TkDiff itself has no knowledge of what -bwB means and simply relies on the invoked engine to "do as you have asked". As such it has no way to distinguish whether the size or type or existance of "blanks" in the data were responsible for the line being classified as "different" by the engine, and consequently has no way of marking such differences other than the truthful fact that it is not the same. Thus you get to see all actual changes.
If TkDiff were to ever provide its own engine, then it would be possible to align its settings with those that mark the results to provide your described "consistent" view. Unfortunately, such is not likely to ever happen.
Version 4.3 is now released and perhaps provides better documentation on why it cannot, at this time, actively suppress "some" changes and not others. We appreciate your input, and perhaps we may at some future time invent a way to accomplish your suggestion without compromising the base tennents of the tool. However, for now we are closing this ticket.
Changed the status on this ticket in light of recent developments. As of V5.4, the requested functionality now exists. The underlying issue was one of PERFORMANCE, not a lack of desire. Hope this gives you what you were looking for