When comparing P4Merge vs vimdiff, the Slant community recommends vimdiff for most people. In the question“What are the best folder/file compare/diff tools for either OSX, Linux or Windows?” vimdiff is ranked 4th while P4Merge is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose vimdiff is:
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.
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 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.
Pro Lightweight
Since it's inside vim, it's very lightweight and fast. It fires up quickly and it does all operations painlessly.
Pro Helpful to people who work a lot inside the terminal
Using command-line tools (vim/git) keep you stick in the terminal.
Cons
Con Directory comparison is not supported
With P4Merge it's impossible to compare two different directories to find differences.
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.
