When comparing P4Merge vs GNU Diffutils (diff), the Slant community recommends P4Merge for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux diff tools?” P4Merge is ranked 8th while GNU Diffutils (diff) is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose P4Merge is:
P4Merge is free of charge.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
P4Merge is free of charge.
Pro 3 way merge support
P4Merge presents merge information in 4 panes - BASE, LOCAL, REMOTE and MERGE_RESULT.
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 followinggit 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.
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.
Pro Cross-platform with a good Mac port
P4Merge works on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Pro Command Line Interface makes it easy to use for people who work a lot in the terminal
Great for creating patch files, using with other *nix utilities (for example, colordiff). Does not require a GUI.
Pro Creates patches
These patches can be used to apply the differences to the same source file at a different storage location (different folder, different machine).
Pro Multiple formats
The difference can be output in formats known as normal, unified, ed, rcs, and side-by-side.
Pro Compares entiry directory trees
Two directory trees can be compared file by file recursively. All differences are output concisely.
Cons
Con Directory comparison is not supported
With P4Merge it's impossible to compare two different directories to find differences.
