Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP]

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KDiff3 is better than WinMerge

A lot of people are talking about how great WinMerge is. KDiff3 does the same thing and shows character-by-character differences much better (color-codes which characters/lines were added, deleted, etc.). Add in the ability to diff 3 files (not 3-way merge, diffing and merging 3 input files!) and the ability to adjust the colors and KDiff3 is the clear winner as far as open source merge tools go.

Compare them yourself:

Published Jun 20 2005, 06:59 PM by darrell

Filed under: Windows

Comments

Marc Scheuner said:

Check it out - by FAR the best Diff/compare/merge tool out there, for Windows, handling both ASCII and Unicode files (even mixed). No comparison in any other tool I know of.....
http://www.araxis.com

# June 20, 2005 10:46 PM

Martin Schmidt said:

There are multiple diff tools around. I agree that, from the free ones, WinMerge and KDiff3 are probably so far the best on Windows.

But I highly recommend Beyond Compare. Once having worked with it I never wanted to go back to the available open source tools again. It's really affordable (30 per seat or so) and does a very good job. There are even a few plugins e.g. for comparision of binary files.

http://www.scootersoftware.com/moreinfo.php
http://www.scootersoftware.com/en/shot7w.png

Araxis Merge looks even nicer. I havent tried it yet and its price definitely left the sphere of "remarkably cheap".

# June 21, 2005 12:33 AM

.Net Adventures said:

# June 21, 2005 3:29 AM

Aaron Junod said:

I'm with you.. After using it for a couple months, per your suggestion, we are extremly happy with kdiff. I still have winmerge installed, but it gets less and less use. Thanks again for the tip, and anyone using winmerge owes it to themselves to at least try out kdiff.

# June 21, 2005 4:47 AM

Chris Slatt said:

I'll second that! If it weren't for Kdiff, I probably would have plopped down the money for Araxis Merge. Neither WinMerge nor ExamDiff were doing it for me.

# June 21, 2005 6:56 AM

Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] said:

If you left a comment on my blog in the past week, particularly the KDiff3 post&nbsp;which was getting...

# June 21, 2005 7:21 AM

darrell said:

Marc mentioned it, but KDiff3 does support Unicode. It doesn't have other cool features, but I'm still trying to decide whether those features are worth paying for for the small amount of time I am in KDiff3.

# June 21, 2005 5:33 PM