I believe that worked prior to v0.23.0.

I recently updated to v0.23 and this feels very frustrating to me. I'll try to take up this issue later today and temporarily roll back to v0.22.x on my machine until a new release is made.

I am also not a fan of the current solution but the big UX fail that comes with allowing arrow-left is visualised here:

hope someone has an idea how to solve this.

one idea (also not great) is to open the full-screen diff with a separate key press and not via arrow-right and then one has to naturally escape that fullscreen view via esc and can freely scroll left/right by holding down the arrow keys

To me, restoring the old functionality but allowing a full-screen diff with a dedicated keybind sounds like a good solution. I've been using the v0.23 release lately but I still find the old behavior of resizing the diff view more ergonomic.

Another solution would be to allow word-wrapping which removes the need for scrolling altogether. Wrapped lines could be shown by putting a ↩ (U+21A9) at the end of the wrapped lines. I don't think this needs to be mutually exclusive with the other option though.

Word-wrapping seems to be a good solution. Another possible approach - scroll the diff viewer only with vim-like hjkl and use arrows only for pane navigation.

I'm not a big fan of hjkl because it assume a qwerty-like keyboard layout and it's not very intuitive. However, I'll take it over the current behavior which I find more confusing.

Perhaps we can only allow key-repeat when scrolling and require a new keypress to exit out of the view.

Perhaps we can only allow key-repeat when scrolling and require a new keypress to exit out of the view.

unfortunately terminals do not allow that distinction

I want to discuss the initial question about this issue.
I meet the same problem like the beginning.
But i found that if i open the same view of Log[2] > Files: > Diff, i can use q to exit the preview of difference.
So maybe we can use the same way for the Status > Unstaged Changes > Diff to exit the preview with q.

It seems like #1955 is relevant here — the distinction between diff-as-pane (in the status view) and fullscreen diff seems important for usability.

In my opinion a good usability guideline for arrow key navigation is: If you can ENTER a mode with right arrow, you should be able to EXIT it with left arrow.

It seems like there are a few ways to fix this:

1. Restore pre-0.23 behavior. Add a keybinding to "zoom" into fullscreen diff, where left/right-arrows scroll and Esc exits back to status view.

2. Restore pre-0.23 behavior. Add new keybindings for horizontal scrolling. (Maybe < and > by default? They're near the arrow keys in a lot of layouts.)

3. (This is kinda wild but hear me out.) Keep the current behavior, but add a guard time after which left-arrow will exit the fullscreen diff. Could be a good proxy for whether the user is just holding down the left arrow to scroll or not. Idk, just a thought.

put 666ms into guardTime
on leftArrow
    if can scroll left
        put current time into lastLeftArrowTime
        scroll left
    else
        if current time > lastLeftArrowTime + guardTime
            exit diff view
        else
            do nothing
        end if
    end if
end leftArrow