I’ve hardly ever used anything other than Meld. Can you recommend anything else?
It would be extra nice if you give a reason for your recommendation (as a Comment).
[note] I want an alternative because Meld has recently lost the feature to copy entire contents from one file to another. I’m referring to the functionality available via the Copy To Left/Right right-click menu item.
[update] I just checked, and the problem was introduced by 1.3.2. 1.3.1 works well, and the latest I’ve checked is 1.4.0, and it doesn’t work.
Answers:
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Method 1
There are a number of tools that are usable:
- meld
- kompare — diff file viewer
- kdiff3 — file difference viewer
- Diffuse — file difference viewer
Do you have two files and want to view their differences? Use a “file difference viewer”. Do you have a diff file and want to look at it in an easy-to-read display? Use a “diff file viewer”.
Method 2
There is also vimdiff (with its GUI version gvimdiff).
Method 3
Emacs’ bundled ediff package is a pretty good diff viewer (start with the commands in Emacs’ Tools / Compare and Tools / Merge menus). It has all the basic features (highlight the differences between two files, jump between differing blocks) and most common intermediate features (compare portions of files, compare revisions grabbed from version control, compare directory trees, use a common ancestor as a reference point, produce a merged version). It doesn’t have very fancy ignore capabilities, however.
What Emacs has over most other diff viewers includes better search capabilities, syntax highlighting, Lisp extensibility. Oh, and an integrated editor.
Method 4
I recommend kdiff3. It can be used both by programmers to compare src files during software development or by people doing periodic backup to compare 2 folders (recursively all the way down), the first one in your system hard disk and the second one external backup hard hard disk.
In the later case you can configure for a date and time and size comparison as opposed to line by line comparison needed by programmers. It comes up with a nice colour coded output for each dir/file involved in the comparison and you can selectively add/remove the new files you have created/deleted in your system hard disk to the backup hard disk.
Method 5
I have used tkdiff (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkdiff/) for years. It does what I want as far as displaying differences between files, and it’s able to write out a “merge” file with any ol’ selection of left and right file difference selections.
Drawback: it’s written in Tcl/Tk, and not all systems have that.
Method 6
I think xxdiff does what you want.
Method 7
A comparison of various diff utils. Old but still valid.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0