Comments on: Finding the difference between two files

By: Steven Harms

Steven Harms — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:22:05 +0000

@jldugger

In that screenshot I believe I ran the same diff command then piped it to colordiff, but adding an alias to .bash_profile would do the trick also.

By: jldugger

jldugger — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:56:50 +0000

Did you have to do anything to configure your shell to use colordiff instead of regular diff?

By: Gregor

Gregor — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:30:25 +0000

I use meld regularly and love it – especially the directory comparison view, from which you can quickly “inspect” versions of files that are marked as being different!

By: steve

steve — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:15:22 +0000

I have kdiff installed on nearly every box at work, great program.

By: Igor

Igor — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:48:35 +0000

Great article! I’m impressed that some developers don’t really know how to use the basic UNIX diff tools.

Its worth to say that most SCM tools out there include a diff tool already, some use the UNIX diff some doesn’t, but almost always you can diff your changes with the committed version doing a:

“scm tool” diff

for example:

git diff
svn diff

By: Dirk Deimeke

Dirk Deimeke — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:36:13 +0000

Try vimdiff or gvimdiff for files and directories …

By: Lee Braiden

Lee Braiden — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:34:11 +0000

Yep, colordiff, and especially meld, are great. Meld also supports version control systems, so you can do something like “meld .” in your bzr branch, and see browse the changes easily.

By: Deskin

Deskin — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:30:40 +0000

# apt-get install git-core
$ git diff –color file1 file2

OT: Your captcha system is broken, I wrote ‘twelve’ when it asked me to please add 6 and 6, but that wasn’t good enough

By: Jonas

Jonas — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:07:43 +0000

I’ve never been much of a meld fan…works to be sure, but I’ve always found Kompare (YMMV) gives a better overview.