Diffuse: Visual File Comparison and File Merge Software

Diffuse is free file comparison software used to compare and merge text files. This software can compare more than one file at a time and lets us manually edit the lines.

Here are some of the features of this free file comparison software:

• You will be able to merge or compare many files at the same time making n-way merges possible.
• Users can perform the line matching and correction by themselves.
• The software allows you to directly edit the file.
• It is possible to highlight the syntax in the files.
• The software supports various other platforms like Subversion,CVS, Darcs, Bazaar, Monotone, RCS, SVK, Git, and Mercurial.
• The support is available for UTF-8 encode.
• You can perform as many undo as you wish.
• Keyboard navigation is as easy as it gets.

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For file comparison, either use the menu ‘new 2-way file merge’ or ‘new 3-way file merge’. It will create additional tabs required for the comparison. You can specify the file names and its revisions either on the open file dialogue or the command line. Diffuse visual file comparison software inserts gaps in between the lines to make it look identical. The difference between the lines can be highlighted with a background color.

The comparison summary is placed in the right margin. The summary gives an idea about the changes brought in to make it identical. Green color is used to indicate the manual edits. The region currently being focused is indicated by a blue cursor. If you want to shift the focus to some other region, you can simply click on that particular location.

Some other comparison related tools we reviewed earlier include: AptDiff, Compare Excel Sheets, and Compare directories.

Diffuse is capable of running on any POSIX operating system including the Mac OS X. However, Mac needs to have both Python 2.4 and PyGTK installed on the machine. For Windows, the package comes with the all the dependencies. Apart from that, it also works on Linux.

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