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Meld - a great visual diff and merge tool for linux
- angusgr 16y agoOne thing Meld cannot easily do (unless it's changed very recently) is manually align blocks of text when autoalignment fails. I recommend Diffuse for that, and also for three-way merging: http://diffuse.sourceforge.net/ http://diffuse.sourceforge.net/ I do join in recommending Meld for your everyday diff/merge, though. :)
- anoncwd34 16y agoCan anyone post screenshots of Meld in Ubuntu 10.10? edit: Just curious.
- prog 16y agoFor Windows I found WinMerge to be quite useful: http://winmerge.org/ http://winmerge.org/
- schumihan 16y agoI like winmerge. Even kdiff3 is not as useful as winmerge, IMHO. http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/ http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
- acqq 16y agoCan they be even compared? KDiff3 merges based on the "common ancestor" (3 versions to the fourth) and I don't see in that feature in the screenshots of WinMerge?
- schumihan 16y agoMost of the time, I use both as a tool to do visual diff, instead of code merge. KDiff3 is not so good as winmerge as visual diff tool. And kdiff3 UI has small problem on Ubuntu, as it was not developed for gnome environment.
- Luyt 16y ago+1. I use WinMerge on a daily basis on my Windows development machines. It's a very complete and polished program, typically written by people who use it themselves and want their tools to be the best.
- alnayyir 16y agoThen why does their website make it look like shareware garbage? Yellow? Ow. :(
- buster 16y agoAhh, meld. It's awesome! After searching for some good diff (visual) tools, i found that one and never had problems.
- sqrt17 16y agoDoes it support non-ASCII/non-UTF8 encodings now? meld's failure to do anything meaningful with files in other encodings (i.e., 95% of the sourcecode I have) made me go with diffuse even though meld looks slightly nicer.
- qaexl 16y agoDoes Diffuse have three-panel merge?
- gnosis 16y agoDiffuse can do n-way merges. So, yes. Unfortunately (for automation's sake), there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to specify a single default output file. So you need to manually save whichever file you merged in to, and then refuse at the prompt to save the rest.
- qaexl 16y agoSo that isn't quite the same as Meld's left-, right- and center panels where the center is whatever output you want saved.
- gnosis 16y agoYou could just use Diffuse's center panel as the one to merge in to and save. But there's no way to make it the one that's saved by default. You have to select it as the one to save, and then you have to refuse in the dialog that asks whether you want to save the other two.
- eliben 16y agoMeld is nice, but I also prefer diffuse. I found its Hg and SVN integration more convenient
- aerique 16y agoHow does it compare to ediff? This has been my diff tool of choice lately but I'm always interested in improvements. note: I use Emacs for many other things so that specific point is not a pro or con for me.
- lelele 16y agoNever understood how Emacs users manage to compare two directories. Diffing with Emacs always seemed cumbersome to me. Would you please post a video of a directories diff session of yours? Thank you.
- lt 16y agoI love Beyond Compare: http://www.scootersoftware.com/ http://www.scootersoftware.com/ Even though it's commercial I gladly payed for it. It's really fast, does a great job on aligning automatically, easily lets me isolate blocks or do manual align, has rules for comparing files, and I could go on.
- mkramlich 16y agoI loved it too. Only Windows app I miss since switching to Mac/Linux only.
- dragonquest 16y agoBC version 3 now comes with Linux support in nice little deb, rpm and tarred packages.
- chanux 16y agoThanks HN for giving me a tool I never realized I need.
- qaexl 16y agoMeld is the only tool I know of that shows a 3-panel merge. That's the killer feature for me. Now, if there were an OSX-native app that does 3-panel merges, I'd gladly switch off of Meld.
- naish 16y agoAraxis Merge might be what you are looking for (Professional version only). http://www.araxis.com/merge/ http://www.araxis.com/merge/ Unfortunately, it is not inexpensive.
- kbd 16y agokdiff3 works on mac
- j_s 16y agoI believe the cross-platform (so semi-native) PlasticSCM's included xmerge has what you're looking for: http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/07/xmerge-to-merge-refactored-code.html http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/07/xmerge-to-merge-r...
- turtle4 16y agoDiffmerge from sourcegear is free and runs natively on os x (in addition to win and Linux) and does 3 panel merges, as well as folder diffs pretty well.
- amjith 16y agoOld but still relevant: http://amjith.blogspot.com/2007/07/visual-diff-tools-in-linux.html http://amjith.blogspot.com/2007/07/visual-diff-tools-in-linu...
- megamark16 16y agoAnd it's so easy to install! apt-get install meld.
- makmanalp 16y agoWhat about vimdiff, that's already installed on most (unix-based) computers? http://andrejk.blogspot.com/2008/04/vimdiff-howto.html http://andrejk.blogspot.com/2008/04/vimdiff-howto.html
- burgerbrain 16y agoAgreed. The great part about vimdiff is that you can easily use it to rapidly make changes and view the diff of them. It's essential for cleaning up changes before a commit for me.
- gnosis 16y agovimdiff is nice, but suffers from one major deficiency. It can't do three-way diffs.
- cookiecaper 16y agoI prefer Kompare: http://www.kde.org/applications/development/kompare/ http://www.kde.org/applications/development/kompare/
- gnosis 16y agoUnfortunately, it doesn't look like the stable version is capable of 3-way merges. Glad to see they're working on implementing that feature, though.
- j_s 16y agoPlastic SCM's diff/merge tool has a unique feature that can be useful: moved code detection. http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=24868&posted=1#post24868 http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=24... It is a newer commercial product with several rough edges, but now there's a "community edition" to try out (it's possible to use just the diff/merge tool without obtaining a license key to setup the server portion): http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/11/building-plastic-scms-community-with.html http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/11/building-plastic-...
- gnosis 16y agoI'd try this if this was in the standard gentoo repository.
- pbiggar 16y agoDoes anyone know how to install this on Mac (preferably homebrew or macports)? It's killing me not having it.