KDiff3
KDiff3 [1] 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 [2] 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.
