What do you do if you want to know how a bill in the legislature changed from one version to another? Software developers encounter this problem all the time with their code and use something called a diff tool to tackle it. My favorite is Kaleidoscope.

Pick a bill on the Massachusetts Legislature website. On the bill page find your old version and right click “view text” and choose “open in new tab”. CMD+A followed by CMD+C on Mac will copy the text of the bill. Then in Kaleidoscope go to the Edit menu choose “Paste to New Comparison”. Go to the page with the other version of the bill and repeat this process. Now you can see what changed between two bills in Kaleidoscope!

You can see how this works in the below screencast: