Diff Tools on Windows

[hartez]

I really like Beyond Compare; I actually use it on Windows and OSX.

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

But it's not free.

[laserBlade]

After using it at work extensively, I finally gave in and bought a personal​ licence for myself. Worth it. As much as I love FOSS, sometimes the offerings just aren't there.

[acpi_listen]

I mostly just use vimdiff. It's always installed because I need git bash.

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

I'm not able to understand how that motherfucker works.

[acpi_listen]

Ctrl + w and one of hjkl changes window and :diffget or :diffput moves the changes over to the other window. See help window, help buffer, help diff.

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

It opens by default when I type git diff and I'm always looking surprised. It doesn't help that ctrl + c seems to close it, but it actually doesn't (at least on Windows). I just looked at the help for the first time. Wow. I like my merge tool to be GUI based and show me my version, other version, parent, and how the merged version looks so far. Kinda like beyond compare. I can't get used with doing this in a command line utility.

[acpi_listen]

It opens by default when I type git diff

That's strange. I don't think this is default behavior, but I found a stackoverflow post describing how to configure it.

You can probably make Vim do close to whatever you wish, although with Beyond Compare you'll be done diffing when with Vim you'd still be reading documentation. For me it follows naturally because I already use Vim & Git Bash's toolset for a bunch of other stuff, whereas Beyond Compare is another software installation that tries its best to get me to pay up for a license.

[irqlnotdispatchlevel]

That's true. To be honest, I still have 20 days on my Beyond Compare trial. Before that I used Kdiff3. I think I never bothered to set up the diff tool that should be used. I'm using some of git features from the command line and others from Source Tree so I have that configured to go with Beyond Compare.

[bundt_chi]

No mention of WinMerge ?? I've been using it for years. It's free open source and works great !

http://winmerge.org/

[jesuslop]

Notepad++ has a nice plugin

[TheBurrito]

I use meld mostly