Thursday, October 05, 2006
Diffing
InnerLoop has an excellent diff cool called DIFFzilla. The name is actually trademarked. You can access it from the Tools -> File Difference menu item.
It can be used to diff just about anything, text files, a directory tree, binary files, and if you have a revision control system setup it can even diff against different versions in the repository. It does a very good job in aligning the files you are diffing to clearly display what is the same and what is not.
One of the cool things about DIFFzilla is you can edit the files right in the diff window. If you see something that needs to be changed there is no reason to go back to the edit window to make change, just change it right in the diff display and save, very cool.
You can also run just the diff engine from the command line. If you like to work at the shell prompt and need to do a diff there is no reason to settle for the unix diff. After 15 years I still forget if the first or the second file has the <> on the diff results when using unix diff. You can run DIFFzilla by doing
% vsdiff file1 file2
If you want to do more complex things just type vsdiff and the configuration dialog will open and you can setup what you want to diff.
Since my brain shuts off sometimes and I resort to old habits I just alias diff to vsdiff.
Give it a try.
InnerLoop has an excellent diff cool called DIFFzilla. The name is actually trademarked. You can access it from the Tools -> File Difference menu item.
It can be used to diff just about anything, text files, a directory tree, binary files, and if you have a revision control system setup it can even diff against different versions in the repository. It does a very good job in aligning the files you are diffing to clearly display what is the same and what is not.
One of the cool things about DIFFzilla is you can edit the files right in the diff window. If you see something that needs to be changed there is no reason to go back to the edit window to make change, just change it right in the diff display and save, very cool.
You can also run just the diff engine from the command line. If you like to work at the shell prompt and need to do a diff there is no reason to settle for the unix diff. After 15 years I still forget if the first or the second file has the <> on the diff results when using unix diff. You can run DIFFzilla by doing
% vsdiff file1 file2
If you want to do more complex things just type vsdiff and the configuration dialog will open and you can setup what you want to diff.
Since my brain shuts off sometimes and I resort to old habits I just alias diff to vsdiff.
Give it a try.
# posted by Jason Andrews @ 2:14 AM 
