Michael Flanakin's Web Log

This have been very useful for me. Thx

You should really try Tkdiff. I've used it for years. It is one of the best IMHO. In particular it is one of the very few that shows the exact character changes. A bit week on the merging side though. I am now considering to move to Kdiff3 because of the 3-way.

If consider only freeware, here are my my personal preferences:
- Kompare on unix/linux (Meld looks good, but haven't had change to try it).
- Examdiff (free) and Winmerge on windows.

- I'd like to second Dave Wong about ExamDiff (check out www.Prestosoft.com) but the Pro version (yeah, it's not free) is much better than than the freebie version.

You mention Kompare and Meld together. You should know that Meld is far superior for matching changes in lines (e.g. two files that have many lines in common except for a few chars in each line have been modified - Kompare just marks them all as different, while Meld will highlight the char changes and match the lines). I find Kompare useless for the source code changes I work with (converting from one operating system or compiler to another). I've used Kompare, TkDiff, WinMerge, Beyond Compare, KDiff3, Meld, and others. Meld is the best for complicated file changes (has the best chance of matching back up), as well as filtering of lines (e.g. ignore !COMMENT, #, _NBR, and ' ", single quotes vs double quotes when matching up a line), of course it doesn't run on Windows. Kdiff3 is good on Windows, but very slow on the WindowsXP PC's in my office for some reason, and the only filtering is via an external program you must supply (e.g. a perl routine or something). WinMerge isn't bad. BeyondCompare is very good, but not free ($35 or so).

I have used a tool called Araxis Merge. It is not free but is extremely powerful and has an excellent UI. It can be integrated with CVS and Subversion clients and has report generation capabilities. Well worth the money ... the only diff/merge tool I use

Check out SmartSynchronize. It's Java, so I'm assuming it works fine on Linux.

Thanks for good tips!