support for inserting annotations (code review comments)

[evanbattaglia]

I've been thinking about how to use delta as a base for a gerrit/github terminal code review tool. Delta's beautiful diff output is awesome, I just need to figure out a way to display the comments (and make a new comment, but that's a secondary concern for now).

I have a JSON file list of comments with authors, files, and line numbers, and I'd like to merge that into the output (probably right below the commented line). I played around with doing git show | delta > diff.txt and merging the comments into that output, but it requires parsing delta's output to figure out files and line numbers. Doable, but seems fragile and hacky (for instance, I need to remove color codes, it's hard to identify a new filename), and delta may know the correct terminal size.

As far as I can tell, delta doesn't have support for adding any extra annotations, is this correct? has this possibility been explored? e.g., you give it a JSON file of files/line numbers (and tell it which file the line numbers are for) and text blobs, and it adds in the annotations under the lines.

If that's too specific of a feature, maybe some way to make delta output the user-friendly pretty output along with machine-readable metadata (not sure how this would work)? Or some kind of plugin system?

Anyway, just wanted to see if people think would be a viable feature, if there's an easier method I missed. Thanks for an awesome tool!