dans.blog


The miscellaneous ramblings and thoughts of Dan G. Switzer, II

WinMerge is a great Open Source Diff tool

In the past I've blogged about some free Windows-based Diff tools—like ExamDiff. However I recently came across WinMerge—an "Open Source visual text file differencing and merging tool for Win32 platforms."

I've only been playing around with it for a couple of days, but I'm very impressed so far. It does a very good job visualizing the differences in files and has a lot of configuration options (such as how to interpret whitespace.) You create patch files, merge the changes together and even compare folder contents.

The feature I really like is Windows Explorer Context Menu integration. The context menu allows you to select two files in Windows Explorer and right-click and select the "Compare" option and instantly get a diff from those two files. There's also an option called "Compare To" which allows you to select a single file and then you can explore to another folder highlight a second file and select the "Compare" option to compare those two files. I really like this option. For me this is generally much more convienent than open the program and using an "Open" dialog to compare two files. I just find when I need to compare two files and I'm not already in Eclipse, then I'm probably looking at the files in Explorer—so the context menu integration is extremely convienent.

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