KDiff3

KDiff3 is a KDiff3 is a diff and merge program that

• compares or merges two or three text input files or directories,
• Shows the differences line by line and character by character (!),
• Provides an automatic merge-facility and
• An integrated editor for comfortable solving of merge-conflicts,
• Supports Unicode, UTF-8 and other codecs, autodetection via byte-order-mark "BOM"
• Supports KIO on KDE (allows accessing ftp, sftp, fish, smb etc.),
• Printing of differences,
• Manual alignment of lines,
• Automatic merging of version control history ($Log$),
• and has an intuitive graphical user interface.
• Windows-Explorer integration Diff-Ext-for-KDiff3 - shell extension included in installer (originally by Sergey Zorin: see also Diff Ext)
• KDE-Konqueror/Dolphin service menu plugin
• Simplified integration with IBM-Rational-Clearcase for Windows (Details).
• Read what else is special in a short abstract (PDF).

Implementations

KDiff3 has been implemented for:

• Linux
• Mac OSX
• Windows
• Unix

Linux/Mac/Unix

The Linux/Mac/Unix implementation of KDiff3 is able to use sed as preprocessor. Ded makes it possible to filter the file-lines before comparing them, so enables the remove of not wanted comparison such as Version Control Statements (CVS/SVN).

However a very annoying bug is the fact that in the KDiff3 you need to use a double quote in stead of a single quote. Am example always helps. Suppose you don't want to compare the following code-line:

   @version: 1.0.2.2 - 05 Mar 2013 - $Id: Webpage.php 149 2013-05-20 09:26:01Z machafr $

The line you can test with sed in terminal (Mac) is:

  cat Webpage.php | sed 's/^@version.*\$//'

In kDiff3 at the preference->diff->preprocessor command:

  sed "s/^@version.*\$//"

Nice workaround.

See also

• Beyond Compare, All platform Compare utility.
• KDiff3 preprocessor bug, A bug report of the double quotes is in KDiff3 when using the sed preprocessor.
• FileMerge, Mac OSX native build in application in Xcode.