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What are some alternatives to WinMerge and the pros and cons of each?

Seth
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Judge Maygarden
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3 Answers3

141

The best I like is Meld

There are many choices available though. As a vim fan I find myself using vimdiff, kompare for the kde crowd - there also some paid version that have linux versions like Beyond Compare . The pros/cons depends on what you're looking for/looking to do.

vimdiff is great because you can run it from a terminal, over an ssh connection, and if you already use vim, you get to keep your tools/config options.

Meld has a pretty clean user interface, and does three way and directory diffs. You'll have to try a couple and see which does the job as you're expecting them to do for your own needs.

To install MeldMeld app page from the Ubuntu repos, you can run:

sudo apt-get install meld

You can then pick the files/folders to compare, and compare them: enter image description here enter image description here

Wilf
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Rick
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30

Another one is diffuse

It is free, crossplatform (written in python), has source code highlight, can interact with many version control tools.

vh1
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19

Kdiff3

Is a pretty good 3 way merge tool.

alt text

Some of its features are:

  • 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
    KDE-Konqueror service menu plugin
Decio Lira
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