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What is the best alternative to GNU Diffutils (diff)?
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DiffMerge
All
5
Experiences
Pros
4
Cons
1
Top
Pro
Completely free
DiffMerge is free of charge to download and use for both commercial and open source projects. There's no license needed. However, people who want to contribute to the project monetarily can do so.
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Con
Startup time can be slow
DiffMerge's startup time can be quite slow sometimes.
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Pro
Cross platform
DiffMerge is cross platform and is available for all major operating systems. This means WIndows, Linux and OSX
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Pro
Folder compare
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Pro
Three way merges
DiffMerge supports three way merges.
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44
0
QtCreator/Qt
All
5
Experiences
Pros
3
Cons
2
Top
Pro
Visual GUI designer
QtCreator has QtDesigner component, allowing you to design a GUI in visual mode instead of raw code.
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Con
Vendor lock on QtCreator
It's not simple at all to use Qt in a different IDE, and you'll lose QtDesigner.
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Pro
Ready-made classes for most used tasks in desktop app development
Launching external applications, getting environment variables, putting tasks to separate threads, offscreen painting, transparent loading of most used image formats, even such helpers as opening files in default application configured in OS, cross-platform (!).
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Con
Big overhead
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Pro
Cross platform
Qt supports most popular platforms including Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. This allows developers to easily port applications to different platforms.
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6
0
Sublimerge
All
10
Experiences
Pros
5
Cons
5
Top
Pro
Three-way diff allows easy merging of files
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Con
Bad tech support
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Pro
sublimerge
i recommend Sublimerge
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Con
It's NOT Open Source
You can't fix or, implement nothing. And when the developer abandons the project you will be left in the lurch.
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Pro
Highlights intraline changes
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Con
It's not free
Nither as free price nor as free in freedom.
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Pro
Built-in support for Git, Subversion and Mercurial commands
Sublimerge automatically integrates with your version control history, and lets you compare between revisions, branches, remotes, and the staging area.
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Con
Cannot compare text within the same file
Sublimerge can only compare entire file diffs, but not two selections within a file. Comparing within files can be useful for example, by refactoring two similar functions to use a shared function. With Sublimerge, you need to copy the sections into two new temporary tabs and compare between the two. This can be cumbersome, as if you have another untitled file, you won't be able to know which one is which.
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Pro
Can compare to clipboard contents
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Con
No version control integration
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Experiences
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110
8
Kompare
All
4
Experiences
Pros
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Can create patch files
Kompare can create a patch file which lists the differences between two files. Patch files created this way are also compatible with the patch files created by the CLI diff utility.
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Pro
Supports comparing directories
Kompare can compare both files and directories.
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Pro
Configurable hotkeys
Because it's a KDE app, all the hotkeys are configurable
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Specs
Platforms:
Linux
License:
Free and Open Source
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9
1
vimdiff
All
4
Experiences
Pros
3
Cons
1
Top
Pro
Mouse-free interface
It's practically vim, this means that the whole interface is mouse-free, this increases development speed significantly since you are only using the keyboard.
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Con
Not for people who are not used to vim
Since this is basically a vim feature, it's clear that people who aren't used to vim and it's keyboard-based interface would find it very hard to work with vimdiff.
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Pro
Lightweight
Since it's inside vim, it's very lightweight and fast. It fires up quickly and it does all operations painlessly.
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Pro
Helpful to people who work a lot inside the terminal
Using command-line tools (vim/git) keep you stick in the terminal.
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97
13
Kdiff3
All
17
Experiences
Pros
9
Cons
7
Specs
Top
Pro
Supports 3 way merges
For modern version control systems, 3way merge support is a basic requirement, but many other open source diff viewers do not adequately handle 3way merges.
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Top
Con
Cannot do inline diffs
Comparison of 2 files is always side-by-side and there's no option for inline views. Overall a rather poor and confusing UI in general.
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Pro
Free and open source
KDiff3 is completely free to download and use. It's also open source released under the GPL.
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Con
Confusing GUI
4 sub-windows (when you really only need 3), a lot of different colors and even more confusing result-window. No links what has changed between versions and and the result. It clearly shows it's dated or rather outdated. Great if you ever need to do a command line merge, otherwise it sucks.
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Pro
Can compare directories
It is able to compare whole directory trees.
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Con
No precise editing of the compared files
Precise work line-after-line is not possible. Only a version after the automated merge-step is editable, but not the two files separately.
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Pro
Supports editing files directly
In addition to comparing two files it also allows you to edit the merge result right in place.
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Con
No longer supported by Homebrew for MacOS
Cannot be installed easily on Mac as of Aug 2019.
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Pro
Diff by character not by lines
On comparing two files, difference is shown by characters; not by lines.
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Con
Problems when files have different number of lines
For example, if you add 3 lines: A, B and C locally but on the other change there are only A and C, Kdiff3 will work out that A was added, then it says that B conflicts with C but adds C again anyway.
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Pro
The UI is customizable
Allow customizing colors regardless of user/system theme.
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Con
Slow for large files
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Pro
Supports manual code aligning
With selecting code in one window and hitting Ctrl+Y, then selecting some other code in second window and also hitting Ctrl+Y you can manually align the code.
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Con
No image compare
Compare is text based.
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Pro
Preprocessing before calculating differences
There are options that may pre-process compared files before Kdiff3 actually do a comparison - to ignore for example automatically generated dates and/or revision numbers added by commit hooks.
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Pro
Context menu shortcut
You can right-click a folder/file and the options: Save <file> for later Compare with will be available, making launching KDiff3 really convenient.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, Linux, Mac
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Experiences
Free
496
68
P4Merge
All
7
Experiences
Pros
5
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
Free
P4Merge is free of charge.
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Top
Con
Directory comparison is not supported
With P4Merge it's impossible to compare two different directories to find differences.
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Pro
3 way merge support
P4Merge presents merge information in 4 panes - BASE, LOCAL, REMOTE and MERGE_RESULT.
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Pro
Detects minimal changes without having a common ancestor
After a merge sometimes you have conflicts. You can resolve them by using a merge tool. You can run git mergetool --tool-help to get more details about what tools are supported. You will get an output like the following git mergetool --tool=<tool> may be set to one of the following: p4merge tortoisemerge vimdiff vimdiff2 vimdiff3 The following tools are valid, but not currently available: araxis bc bc3 codecompare deltawalker diffmerge diffuse ecmerge emerge gvimdiff gvimdiff2 gvimdiff3 kdiff3 meld opendiff tkdiff winmerge xxdiff Some of the tools listed above only work in a windowed environment. If run in a terminal-only session, they will fail.
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Pro
Also has image diffing
For those who are working in both text based source code or files, as well as images, its nice to have the diff functionality of both present in the same product.
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Pro
Cross-platform with a good Mac port
P4Merge works on Windows, Linux and OS X.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows; Mac; Linux
License:
Free
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Experiences
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271
48
Beyond Compare
All
17
Experiences
Pros
13
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Supports comparing folders
Beyond Compare can be used to compare both files and folders. File-Filters possible.
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Top
Con
No dark mode
Lack dark mode.
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Pro
Supports 3 way merge
Good overview. Clear display of changed lines (background color) and changed characters (foreground color).
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Con
No touch support
This is important for scrolling
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Pro
Supports editing files directly
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Con
Paid proprietary software
Beyond Compare is not free. It offers different license options depending on the number of members in a team and depending on the software version.
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Pro
Has rules for adding ignore-masks and replacement rules
So parts you don't want to see in your comparision can be hidden with ignore masks. Parts that are okay to be changed can be set with change-lists so beyond compare knows what's the replacement value and skips displaying this. So you can focus on the for you important changes. For example with the ignore mask I was able to compare two logs with different timestamps but nearly same content. (beginning with timestams the first x characters adding to ignore)
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Pro
Synchronize folders
Can be used to synchronize folders. Including wildcards.
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Pro
Works well with large files
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Top
Pro
Can be used to compare image files
This is a useful feature for game developers using Git.
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Pro
Opens popular archive formats as directories
Compare archive to directory or to another archive, update ZIP archives by copying files from other side or by editing them directly in compare view.
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Pro
Can compare remote directories
Beyond Compare can compare directories through FTP, SFTP. Also it can compare directories hosted on Dropbox or Amazon S3.
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Pro
One license covers all major OSs (Linux/Windows/Mac)
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Pro
Customer Service is awesome and easy to work with
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Pro
Has Registry compare
You can compare Registry vs Registry or Registry vs .REG file, both local and remote. You can copy values and keys between sides or edit them.
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Pro
Has file conversion/preprocessing feature
You can run a script or executable based on file extension before showing a file. Great for beautifying XML, extracting text from MS Office documents, running dis-asm etc.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows; Mac; Linux
License:
Proprietary
Release Date:
October 19, 2023
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Experiences
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312
54
Visual Studio Code
All
39
Experiences
Pros
24
Cons
14
Specs
Top
Pro
Extendable through plug-ins
Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plug-ins available to extend its functionality.
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Top
Con
Embedded Git isn't powerful enough
You can do nothing but to track changes, stage them and commit. No history, visualization, rebasing or cherry-picking – these things are left to git console or external git client.
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Top
Pro
TypeScript integration
There is very solid TypeScript integration in Visual Studio Code. Both are developed by Microsoft and VSC itself is written in TypeScript.
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Con
The autocomplete and code check is not as powerful as the one on WebStorm
Sometimes it doesn't tell you if you made a typo in a method name or if a method is not used and several other important features.
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Pro
Integrated debugging
VSC includes debugging tools for Node.js, TypeScript, and JavaScript.
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Con
File search is extremely slow
It's absolutely not possible to use this tool with big projects given how long it takes to search for files.
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Pro
Ready to use out of the box
You don't need to configure and add plugins before being productive. However, you can add plugins if needed but for the basics you're well covered.
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Con
Project search limits results
Because file search is so slow your results are limited in order to simulate a faster search.
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Pro
Integrated terminal
There's no need to press alt+tab to go to a terminal: it is directly integrated into the editor. Shift+~ is a handy hotkey to toggle the integrated terminal.
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Con
Very bad auto import
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Pro
Great performance
For a 'wrapped' web-based application, Visual Studio Code performs very well.
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Con
Generalized
VS Code is a general code/scripting IDE built to be lightweight and for people familiar with their language of choice, not directly comparable to Visual Studio in power or scope.
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Pro
Libre/open source
Released under the MIT License.
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Con
Memory hog
Allegedly, VS Code is "lightweight". Yet, running multiple instances of it at once, you may get many "out of memory" messages from Windows despite 16 GB RAM. (While of course also running other things. The point is the comparison with some other IDEs/editors where running them alongside the same number of other applications doesn't cause Windows to run out of memory)
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Pro
Fast and powerful
VS-Code has the speed of Sublime and the power of WebStorm. Perhaps this is the best software that Microsoft has ever created.
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Con
Poor error fix suggestions
Error detection and suggestions/fixes are poor compared to IntelliJ platforms
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Pro
JavaScript IntelliSense support
JavaScript IntelliSense allows Visual Studio Code to provide you with useful hints and auto-completion features while you code.
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Con
A "me too" offering from MS, far behind other well established editors that it attempts to clone
Other IDEs specific to a language often offer better tools for deep programming.
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Pro
Embedded Git control
Visual Studio Code has integrated Git control, guaranteeing speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows.
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Con
Slow launch time
Slower than it's competitors, e.g. Sublime Text.
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Pro
Updated frequently
There's a new release of Visual Studio Code every month. If you are one of the insiders then releases are daily.
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Con
Emmet plugin often fails on even simple p tags
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Pro
ESLint integration
ESLint integrates great. You can define your rules trough .eslintrc.* as usual and vs code will autofix your code on save. So your code is always in style.
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Con
Have no good default js style analyzer
In WebStorm there is analyzer that checks for warnings and highlight this in yellow, here you cannot find or add it even with plugins. It is possible to have it as errors with linter but while you are actively changing file that's not very nice.
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Pro
Extensions (aka plugins) are written in JavaScript
Extensions are written in either Typescript or JavaScript.
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Con
.sass linting is terrible
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Pro
Active development
It's really nice to see how the code editor evolves. Every month there is a new version with great communication of new features and changes.
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Con
Is not an IDE, is a text editor
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Pro
Integrated task runners
Task runners display lists of available tasks and performing these tasks is as simple as a click of the mouse.
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Pro
It has gotten really good
All it takes is one stop for all the features many people need.
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Pro
Custom snippets support
Snippets are templates that will insert text for you and adapt it to their context, and in VSC they are highly customizable.
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Pro
Huge community behind it
The ease of getting assistance and finding tutorials is increasing as the community grows.
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Pro
JS typechecking
It leverages TypeScript compiler functionality to statically type check JS (type inference, JSDoc types) with "javascript.implicitProjectConfig.checkJs": true option.
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Pro
Python support
Excellent Python plugin, originally created by Don Jayamanne, now hired by Microsoft to extend and maintain the extension.
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Pro
Good support for new Emmet syntax
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Pro
High fidelity C# plugin
The Omnisharp plugin is very powerful providing full sln, csproj, and project.json support.
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Pro
Support RTL languages
It supports pretty web rtl languages like arabic languages when most of other editors don't support it.
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Pro
Inline definition picking and usages finding
These features allow you to have a glance at code without opening it as a whole in a separate tab. Moreover, editing is allowed.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, macOS, Linux
License:
MIT, Proprietary (official builds)
Multi Language Support:
Yes
Auto Complete:
Yes
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