Meld - a great visual diff and merge tool for linux

Can they be even compared? KDiff3 merges based on the "common ancestor" (3 versions to the fourth) and I don't see in that feature in the screenshots of WinMerge?

Luyt• 16 years ago

+1. I use WinMerge on a daily basis on my Windows development machines. It's a very complete and polished program, typically written by people who use it themselves and want their tools to be the best.

alnayyir• 16 years ago

Then why does their website make it look like shareware garbage? Yellow? Ow. :(

buster• 16 years ago

Ahh, meld. It's awesome! After searching for some good diff (visual) tools, i found that one and never had problems.

sqrt17• 16 years ago

Does it support non-ASCII/non-UTF8 encodings now? meld's failure to do anything meaningful with files in other encodings (i.e., 95% of the sourcecode I have) made me go with diffuse even though meld looks slightly nicer.

qaexl4• 16 years ago

Does Diffuse have three-panel merge?

gnosis5• 16 years ago

Diffuse can do n-way merges. So, yes.

Unfortunately (for automation's sake), there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to specify a single default output file. So you need to manually save whichever file you merged in to, and then refuse at the prompt to save the rest.

eliben• 16 years ago

Meld is nice, but I also prefer diffuse. I found its Hg and SVN integration more convenient

aerique• 16 years ago

How does it compare to ediff? This has been my diff tool of choice lately but I'm always interested in improvements.

note: I use Emacs for many other things so that specific point is not a pro or con for me.

lelele• 16 years ago

Never understood how Emacs users manage to compare two directories. Diffing with Emacs always seemed cumbersome to me. Would you please post a video of a directories diff session of yours? Thank you.

lt• 16 years ago

I love Beyond Compare: http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Even though it's commercial I gladly payed for it. It's really fast, does a great job on aligning automatically, easily lets me isolate blocks or do manual align, has rules for comparing files, and I could go on.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

I loved it too. Only Windows app I miss since switching to Mac/Linux only.

dragonquest• 16 years ago

BC version 3 now comes with Linux support in nice little deb, rpm and tarred packages.

chanux• 16 years ago

Thanks HN for giving me a tool I never realized I need.

qaexl4• 16 years ago

Meld is the only tool I know of that shows a 3-panel merge. That's the killer feature for me.

Now, if there were an OSX-native app that does 3-panel merges, I'd gladly switch off of Meld.

naish• 16 years ago

Araxis Merge might be what you are looking for (Professional version only).

http://www.araxis.com/merge/

Unfortunately, it is not inexpensive.

kbd• 16 years ago

kdiff3 works on mac

j_s2• 16 years ago

I believe the cross-platform (so semi-native) PlasticSCM's included xmerge has what you're looking for:

http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/07/xmerge-to-merge-r...

qaexl4• 16 years ago

Xmerge looks great. Too bad I'm on git.

turtle4• 16 years ago

Diffmerge from sourcegear is free and runs natively on os x (in addition to win and Linux) and does 3 panel merges, as well as folder diffs pretty well.

amjith• 16 years ago

Old but still relevant: http://amjith.blogspot.com/2007/07/visual-diff-tools-in-linu...

megamark16• 16 years ago

And it's so easy to install! apt-get install meld.

makmanalp• 16 years ago

What about vimdiff, that's already installed on most (unix-based) computers?

http://andrejk.blogspot.com/2008/04/vimdiff-howto.html

burgerbrain• 16 years ago

Agreed. The great part about vimdiff is that you can easily use it to rapidly make changes and view the diff of them. It's essential for cleaning up changes before a commit for me.

gnosis5• 16 years ago

vimdiff is nice, but suffers from one major deficiency. It can't do three-way diffs.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

I prefer Kompare: http://www.kde.org/applications/development/kompare/

gnosis5• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the stable version is capable of 3-way merges.

Glad to see they're working on implementing that feature, though.

j_s2• 16 years ago

Plastic SCM's diff/merge tool has a unique feature that can be useful: moved code detection.

http://www.scootersoftware.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=24...

It is a newer commercial product with several rough edges, but now there's a "community edition" to try out (it's possible to use just the diff/merge tool without obtaining a license key to setup the server portion):

http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2010/11/building-plastic-...

gnosis5• 16 years ago

I'd try this if this was in the standard gentoo repository.

pbiggar• 16 years ago

Does anyone know how to install this on Mac (preferably homebrew or macports)? It's killing me not having it.

Meld - a great visual diff and merge tool for linux

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