
Meld - a great visual diff and merge tool for linux - tagnu_
http://meld.sourceforge.net/
======
prog
For Windows I found WinMerge to be quite useful: <http://winmerge.org/>

~~~
Luyt
+1. I use WinMerge on a daily basis on my Windows development machines. It's a
very complete and polished program, typically written by people who use it
themselves and want their tools to be the best.

~~~
alnayyir
Then why does their website make it look like shareware garbage? Yellow? Ow.
:(

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angusgr
One thing Meld cannot easily do (unless it's changed very recently) is
manually align blocks of text when autoalignment fails.

I recommend Diffuse for that, and also for three-way merging:
<http://diffuse.sourceforge.net/>

I do join in recommending Meld for your everyday diff/merge, though. :)

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lt
I love Beyond Compare: <http://www.scootersoftware.com/>

Even though it's commercial I gladly payed for it. It's really fast, does a
great job on aligning automatically, easily lets me isolate blocks or do
manual align, has rules for comparing files, and I could go on.

~~~
mkramlich
I loved it too. Only Windows app I miss since switching to Mac/Linux only.

~~~
dragonquest
BC version 3 now comes with Linux support in nice little deb, rpm and tarred
packages.

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makmanalp
What about vimdiff, that's already installed on most (unix-based) computers?

<http://andrejk.blogspot.com/2008/04/vimdiff-howto.html>

~~~
burgerbrain
Agreed. The great part about vimdiff is that you can easily use it to rapidly
make changes and view the diff of them. It's essential for cleaning up changes
before a commit for me.

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aerique
How does it compare to ediff? This has been my diff tool of choice lately but
I'm always interested in improvements.

 _note:_ I use Emacs for many other things so that specific point is not a pro
or con for me.

~~~
lelele
Never understood how Emacs users manage to compare two directories. Diffing
with Emacs always seemed cumbersome to me. Would you please post a video of a
directories diff session of yours? Thank you.

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j_s
Plastic SCM's diff/merge tool has a unique feature that can be useful: moved
code detection.

[http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=24...](http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=24868&posted=1#post24868)

It is a newer commercial product with several rough edges, but now there's a
"community edition" to try out (it's possible to use just the diff/merge tool
without obtaining a license key to setup the server portion):

[http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/11/building-
plastic-...](http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/11/building-plastic-scms-
community-with.html)

~~~
gnosis
I'd try this if this was in the standard gentoo repository.

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sqrt17
Does it support non-ASCII/non-UTF8 encodings now? meld's failure to do
anything meaningful with files in other encodings (i.e., 95% of the sourcecode
I have) made me go with diffuse even though meld looks slightly nicer.

~~~
qaexl
Does Diffuse have three-panel merge?

~~~
gnosis
Diffuse can do n-way merges. So, yes.

Unfortunately (for automation's sake), there doesn't seem to be any obvious
way to specify a single default output file. So you need to manually save
whichever file you merged in to, and then refuse at the prompt to save the
rest.

~~~
qaexl
So that isn't quite the same as Meld's left-, right- and center panels where
the center is whatever output you want saved.

~~~
gnosis
You could just use Diffuse's center panel as the one to merge in to and save.

But there's no way to make it the one that's saved by default. You have to
select it as the one to save, and then you have to refuse in the dialog that
asks whether you want to save the other two.

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eliben
Meld is nice, but I also prefer diffuse. I found its Hg and SVN integration
more convenient

------
amjith
Old but still relevant: [http://amjith.blogspot.com/2007/07/visual-diff-tools-
in-linu...](http://amjith.blogspot.com/2007/07/visual-diff-tools-in-
linux.html)

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qaexl
Meld is the only tool I know of that shows a 3-panel merge. That's the killer
feature for me.

Now, if there were an OSX-native app that does 3-panel merges, I'd gladly
switch off of Meld.

~~~
j_s
I believe the cross-platform (so semi-native) PlasticSCM's included xmerge has
what you're looking for:

[http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/07/xmerge-to-
merge-r...](http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/07/xmerge-to-merge-
refactored-code.html)

~~~
qaexl
Xmerge looks great. Too bad I'm on git.

~~~
psantosl
You can always switch to Plastic!! Now it is FREE, didn't you know. Or, as
last resort: why don't you use Xmerge with Git?? :)

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cookiecaper
I prefer Kompare: <http://www.kde.org/applications/development/kompare/>

~~~
gnosis
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the stable version is capable of 3-way
merges.

Glad to see they're working on implementing that feature, though.

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chanux
Thanks HN for giving me a tool I never realized I need.

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buster
Ahh, meld. It's awesome! After searching for some good diff (visual) tools, i
found that one and never had problems.

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pbiggar
Does anyone know how to install this on Mac (preferably homebrew or macports)?
It's killing me not having it.

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anoncwd34
Can anyone post screenshots of Meld in Ubuntu 10.10?

edit: Just curious.

~~~
ifesdjeen
<http://yfrog.com/h4ok4ep>

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megamark16
And it's so easy to install! apt-get install meld.

