I will not cover these in any further detail here, but both are useful adjuncts for many. Not content with dealing with such a broad range of text documents, Kaleidoscope can help you with eyeball comparison of most image file formats, and comparing folder contents. However this does not recognise any styling or content markup, which would have to be compared and merged manually using an appropriate editor. There are further bells and whistles, such the option to ignore whitespace, which is valuable.Īnother huge benefit is the fact that Kaleidoscope will open and compare the text content of many more file types, including XML-based. On balance I think that the interface is just about perfect, although if you don’t like their use of colour, you can turn that off. In some circumstances that might be helpful, but the views could readily dissolve into a riot of colour, leaving you puzzled as to what it all means. I can see how different compare tasks would fit best with different display formats.Īlthough Kaleidoscope handles markup well, tags are not coloured or styled in its views. Not only that, but you can choose between three different options for displaying the results: Blocks, in which differences are shown in blocks spaced equally across the source files Fluid, in which lines join areas which differ and both files are shown over their natural length and Unified, which shows an ingenious single composite view. Here is compares a pair of the three files available. Kaleidoscope is in a different league, with superb use of colour in its powerful front end. A pale purple draws your attention to the paragraph containing the text mismatch, and a deeper purple shows exactly what is different. Other differences, such as mismatched contents and markup, are highlighted in purple. Deletions found are shown using red if they are present in the left (port) document, green if present in the right (starboard). However Kaleidoscope’s flexibility and interface are on a completely different level. The actual compare function works the same as FileMerge, and is sadly not smart enough to spot where words or larger blocks of text have been moved around. It is the most flexible tool in terms of loading documents for comparison, which can be as simple as drag-and-drop, or you can systematically assemble a whole group of files for comparison, a pair at a time, in the same window. BBEDIT SEARCHING FOLDER DOWNLOADIt is a shame that you have to download the whole of Xcode in order to obtain this one component (Apple does not list an unbundled version on the App Store), but it is worth the effort, and certainly a powerful tool for free.įor quite an expensive compare and merge utility (£52.99 from the App Store), I had high expectations of Black Pixel’s flagship app. Although it is intended for text formats, including a wide range of markup types, as an added bonus it also compares the text content of RTF files, but not word processor XML-based formats such as. BBEDIT SEARCHING FOLDER PROFESSIONALFileMerge, free with Xcode, has a solid interface to a professional compare and merge engine.įileMerge has attractive graphical devices which enhance its standard professional performance, but it does not spot block moves. You can of course run FileMerge direct from that folder if you are not already running Xcode. The latter feature is used via the Open Developer Tool menu command, selecting File Merge, and uses that app bundled inside the XcodeTools folder. Xcode (with or without Xcode Server) can compare versions stored in a repository, and any two files in text format. They are of standard professional quality, working on files in text formats, but not ‘intelligent’ enough to spot block moves of text. I will also provide brief mention of single and multi-file search and replace using BBEdit, which is one of its biggest selling points.Ĭornerstone Cornerstone comparing files if you want something grander, you can use an external tool such as Kaleidoscope.Ĭompare features in this version control app use FileMerge, but work only for comparisons between versions of files stored in a version-controlled repository, as far as I can tell. The tools that I am considering in this article thus take two (or more) documents, work out the differences between them, reveal those differences in a manner which allows their rapid review, and allow you to apply selected changes found in one document to the other. Whether or not you use a version control system or versioning, there are times when you need to compare two versions of the same document, and perhaps merge selected changes that have been made from one version to the other.
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