which diff tool do you use?

Southmountain

is there any good diff tool to recommend?

diligent hands rule....

Greg Utas

I've used Windiff and was fairly happy with it. You can find free downloads online. Now that GitHub is integrated with Visual Studio, I just use that to look at diffs. If I had to diff something that wasn't in my repository, I'd probably add the first version of it to the repository, stage it, then add the second version, look at the diff, and later remove them from the repository. Or use Windiff.

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Southmountain

thanks for sharing your tricks! I find some new tools that I am not familiar with, so curious to see any people using them:

Meld - What is Meld? Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers.

Beyond Compare - Beyond Compare allows you to compare files and folders.

kdiff3 - KDiff3 is a file and directory diff and merge tool which compares and merges two or three text...

Araxis Merge - Home of the award-winning Araxis Merge two and three-way file comparison (diff) and merging application, Araxis Find Duplicate Files, Araxis Replace In Files, and the Araxis Ketura issue tracking, project scheduling and time tracking application.

AptDiff - AptDiff is a visual text / binary files comparison and merging utility for Windows.

P4Merge - A valuable tool for diagnosing continuous integration bugs, Folder Diff also measures how much code must be resolved in pending merge scenarios. Visually compare two versions using image diff within P4Merge to determine changes made.

diligent hands rule....

PIEBALDconsult

Code Lean and Mean[^]

Ron Anders

VisualSVN here. I guess that means Tortoise SVN but anyway is integrates with visual studio and really rocks for me.

Lost User

Heh, I remember that contest. Spent a weekend reviewing all of the contest entries. The best implementation didn't win and didn't even enter the contest. This guy posted his code[^] into the discussion forum. It outperformed all of the others by a wide margin and I couldn't find any errors. Unfortunately he never officially entered the contest. It's his only post on the site. :laugh:

RickZeeland

Maybe one of these best-folder-file-compare-diff-tools-for-either-osx-linux-or-windows[^]

PIEBALDconsult

Yeah, I still use my entry occasionally -- such as last week.

DRHuff

Meld. Used it for years on Linux. Haven’t done a diff in windows for 20 years or so. There might be something better on that side of the fence.

If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.

Daniel Pfeffer

I use WinMerge. It's open-source, still maintained, and available in both 32- and 64-bit versions (for those who have really large files... :) )

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.

englebart

Notepad++ has a decent diff. I also use a really old windows tool that continues to just work. It predates scroll wheels on mice. Eclipse has good compare+merge. DOS fc.exe for simple stuff.

CPallini

diff :-)

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Southmountain

I used KDidff old version.

diligent hands rule....

Chris Maunder

[winmerge](https://winmerge.org/)

cheers Chris Maunder

raddevus

WinDiff is my simple favorite. It's quick & easy to use for comparing two files but if you have two directories to compare it is even better. Its a little odd if you've never used it, but once you use it a couple of times it is the leader for simplicity. I couldn't believe when they removed it & didn't make it available any more. In my mind they removed it, but didn't provide any replacement. Just kind of nutty. I went back to an older machine & saved off the windiff64.exe & windiff.exe so I'd always have them on my dev machines.

Peter_in_2780

Meld is my weapon of choice too.

Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012

0x01AA

Beyond Compare for me is great

Joan M

WinMerge works very well, it's simple free and fast.

www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

Nelek

Free Tool I use WinMerge and it is pretty good and enough for most use cases Paid Tool I use BeyondCompare 4 and it is the best I have seen so far

M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

Southmountain

what is its unique feature? I would like give it a try...

diligent hands rule....