Make diff file windows

Share this: Email Tweet. Like this: Like Loading Follow Following. Cognitive Waves. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! It supports three-way comparing and merging and lets you edit files directly from the comparison view.

Apart from diffing files , Meld also supports comparison of folders. It goes well beyond pun intended diffing simple text and also allows comparing PDF, Excel and image files.

The "Pro" version also includes a solid three-way merge. Just like Beyond Compare, Araxis Merge supports more than just text and image files. It comes in standard and professional editions, and for people working on both Windows and macOS, it's good to know that a single license is valid for both platforms.

Another free and open source tool answers to the name of KDiff3. The project hasn't seen many updates in recent years though you may be able to find more recent releases through this page , but it remains a solid diff and merge tool that should satisfy basic needs.

Much like Araxis, the DeltaWalker diff tool also lets you compare office files. If you're regularly performing comparisons on a folder basis, it's good to know that DeltaWalker shines with great performance in this area. Perforce , the company best known for its enterprise version control platform, also offers a solid diff tool: P4Merge is free of charge and comes with a basic feature set that makes it an interesting option on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Besides offering all the standard diff and merge capabilities, Code Compare comes with some special features like syntax highlighting , semantic code comparison and a VisualStudio integration. The basic version can be used free of charge, while the Professional Edition delivers the full feature set. WinMerge is an open-source diff tool with some nice features like folder and image comparison, and three-way file comparison.

Double-click the entry to compare, or click the Expand button. On the left-hand side, you will find a mini-map view that highlights the overall differences throughout the files to quickly navigate right to a section of the file. On the right-hand side, you will find the differences on different color highlighted lines. The color yellow is used to highlight differences in the first file and the color red for the second file.

Now that you have compared the two files to spot differences, you may need to reconcile the differences between the two files. To do this, you can either edit the first file, the second file, or a composite between the two files.

Although WinDiff is not a merge tool, read on to learn how to edit files with changes! First, right-click on the line that you would like to modify. Note that the same lines between the files will have the same line number, as seen below. In this example, to modify a highlighted change, choose to edit the Left File first, which will by default launch in Notepad.

Below, the file has been modified to have an identical second line. Back in the WinDiff utility, right-click on the first modified line and choose Rescan to update the scanned files to look for any changes.

One useful ability within WinDiff is the ability to make a comment on a change. This comment can later be exported to a text file. If you close WinDiff without exporting the comment, it will be lost when WinDiff is closed. First, click on the change to comment on and navigate to the Edit menu and click Insert Comment. Now that you have compared files in WinDiff, you may find you need to compare an entire folder.

Just like files, WinDiff offers the ability to compare two different folders. Follow the steps below to compare two different directories. Enter the location of the two directories to compare. Optionally, you may choose to include sub-directories as well.

Once presented with the list of changes, double-click on the file to expand and further compare. Since you see that file1. WinDiff offers you the ability to Mark a file and hide it from view. Right-click on the file to hide and choose Mark. Once marked, the line will turn yellow. Click the Mark menu and choose Hide Marked Files. If you have a number of files that you would like to ignore, but individually marking them would be time-consuming, then you may specify a regular expression instead.

First, click on the Mark menu and then on Mark Pattern as seen below. Enter in a regular expression to filter out the. Although the defaults in WinDiff work perfectly well, there are times you may want to modify WinDiff to better fit your workflow. Read on to learn what can be customized! Throughout this article, you have used Notepad for your file editing.

A modern editing application to compare files is Visual Studio Code. How then, would you tell WinDiff to launch edits in this utility instead? If VS Code is installed for all users, then use that location instead.