[SUPPORT/BUG] Text diff dialog is shown every 10 seconds

[Glitchy-Tozier]

Question

My setup is that I use Windows 11 and have my notes-folder placed in a OneDrive-synced directory. This way all notes are immediately synced to the cloud upon getting saved. This worked perfectly until I updated to v25.11.3.

What happens now is that the new diff-system seems to think that files were changed externally by OneDrive. Thus, whenever I'm writing a note, I get shown the following dialog every 10-15 seconds.

There's a few issues with this:

• I'm actually not even sure if this might not simply be a bug, as ...
• it is really distracting and completely breaks whatever train of thought you had at the moment. This consistently happens whenever I start writing for a few seconds
• The diff is really strange as it doesn't only show the most recently typed letters, but also tons of line breaks(?) that supposedly have been added/removed
• I assume I can turn off this diff functionality, but It feels really strange that this is the default behavior.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[pbek]

I guess that would be #3366 (comment).
The question is why is something external (OneDrive?) writing into your note files constantly. 🤔
In the settings, there is a checkbox to ignore all external changes.

[pbek]

Looks like OneDrive is constantly converting line-breaks, even while you are writing to your note. 🤔 Pretty annoying.
This dialog only should come when a note is supposed to be saved by QOwnNotes and something external also wrote into the note between 2 write cycles.

[Tearony]

Using Nextcloud the same behavior is apparent, same when using Cryptomator (if that is familiar to anyone) with a Vault outside a cloud drive. I personally only get these interruptions since the last update.

Hope that helps

[pbek]

@Tearony, which operating system? Windows?
Because I don't get this on Linux.

[alexanderino]

I can confirm this occurs with a portable installation running off a USB drive (including the .md files). To be clear: no OneDrive/Dropbox/other cloud provider is involved.

[Tearony]

@pbek, I am using Windows, with a portable installation

[pbek]

Thank you. I will remove the whole checksum checking for Windows then.

[pbek]

To be clear: no OneDrive/Dropbox/other cloud provider is involved.

Thank you for mentioning.

[wolframroesler]

I'm getting the same on Linux. Notes are stored in Nextcloud synced via the Nextcloud client.

My QOwnNotes settings:

• Accept all external modifications of the current note
• note save interval time: 10 seconds

In case the version numbers matter:

• QOwnNotes - version 25.11.3 - Launchpad PPA - build 1230
• Ubuntu 25.04
• Nextcloud Desktop Client Version 4.0.1 (Ubuntu)

[pbek]

On Linux? 🤔
What is the diff shown?
And when do you get the dialog? When you are editing (writing into) a note?

[Mitecon]

I'm using the Flatpak version on Linux (Arch variant) and I'm also seeing this. I doubt this matters since it's also affecting Windows users, but I have a BTRFS filesystem.

All my files are saved locally with no backup/cloud/syncing tools involved whatsoever.

The process is: Type for a little while, get the popup, stop typing, click 'Cancel', resume typing, get the popup...
This repeats infinitely until I finally finish what I'm doing.

What I see looks exactly the same as in the screenshot from the OP above. I notice the popup mentions the differences will be shown in red and green, yet I see no colours in either of the text boxes.

I see there's a setting for Ignore all external modifications for the current note but then I'd have to do that for every note, so I didn't try using this.

I did select Ignore all external note folder changes but it didn't solve this problem.

Out of curiosity, since I was editing a note I created way back which has a *.txt extension, I tried this on a note with a *.md extension to see if there would be any difference. There wasn't - the problem still exists no matter which extension a note has.

IMPORTANT: While I was testing to see what might be the root cause, I've so far discovered a peculiarity:

If I type a single letter, number or symbol, then wait - I do not get the popup.

If I type a single space, then I do get the popup.

Now, typing without using spaces is fairly impossible, so after further testing, I find this:

Type the following: the cat sat on the mat

I get no popup with this sentence.

Now type: the cat sat on the mat (with a space at the end)

I do get a popup with this sentence.

I've only tested with spaces, so I don't know if it's affected by any other symbols or special characters but it's a place to start looking.

[UffeJakobsen]

I'm seeing this problem on Linux - using a plain simple local dir for Notes - no sync tools involved
Plain text files show up with all changed line endings in the new diff dialog...

[pbek]

I still cannot reproduce this on any machine...
Hard to debug, because no one shared a settings dump.
But I added a checkbox.