Talk:Comparison of file comparison tools

message: === Table Enhancements ===
I'd like to see a column added that indicates the programs ability to synchronize files.  I believe Beyond Compare can do this for example.
Also while the table could be improved I found it useful to know what the various programs are, the costs, licensing, and key features and versions etc.  HEnnulat (talk) 21:54, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table Comments 

message: I'd like to see a column added that indicates the programs ability to synchronize files.  I believe Beyond Compare can do this for example.
Also while the table could be improved I found it useful to know what the various programs are, the costs, licensing, and key features and versions etc.  HEnnulat (talk) 21:54, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Table Enhancements 

message: *Documents
*:What documents? HTML documents can be compared by all the utilities.
*Binary (display) Hexadecimal
*:All the utilities can be made to do these. Pipes.
*::Not true at all! Pdev3
*Tables
*:All the utilities can compare tables in all the file formats they can handle.
*Metadata
*:Seriously? What is this supposed to mean?
*Graphics 
*:All utilities can compare at least three types of graphics files.
*::Not true at all! Pdev3
If done properly, this table would wind up containing only lots of yesses. Axe it.
Shinobu 21:52, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Agruments for Axing the table 

message: I am looking for a File- and Directory-Tree Comparer for MacOS before X... Please don't let fall that under the table! Thanks!!
— Preceding unsigned comment added by 157.161.88.147 (talk • contribs) 13:54, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Miscellaneous 

message: What tool does correctly compare files that have non-standard-latin characters in the name or a folder above? Windiff is ignoring any folder containing any non-latin character, and files are reported unaccessible.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.102.189.110 (talk) 17:09, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capability of non-standard-latin characters not mentioned 

message: The three tables are not the same length.
Some of the programs added in the first table are not present in the two other table.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.243.165.186 (talk) 12:21, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rows missing 

message: Same remark as the one related to xml diff tools below: it would be interesting to list wich tools can compare 2 dimensional arrays, eg: compare spreadsheets, csv files. csvdiff is listed and can do that, but maybe there are other tools. 
--Norz (talk) 09:44, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  CSV diff tools 

message: Does anyone have any pointers to XML diff tools?  Should we create a seperate page for XMTL diff tools?
Thanks --Dan 16:06, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There is an XML::Diff Perl library. -- Beland 20:03, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Altova DiffDog is one...it is listed in the first table, but not the features tables.--Ericjs 15:06, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  XML Diff Tools 

message: What does non-linear refer to? Is it to do with the time required to compute the diff? Gary van der Merwe (Talk) 09:24, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-linear ? 

message: Tools than can compare a set of files can typically exclude file names matching a pattern from comparison.
This is called "filtering" by some.
However, some tools also provide the possibility to ignore changes in a comparison.
For example differences in white space, uppercase/lowercase, or even any line matching a regular expression.
The latter is quite useful for excluding automatic keywords inserted by version control systems like CVS, SVN or SourceSafe.
Amongst the few tools I know this feature is provided by GNU diff, meld and WinMerge.
So I suggest to add another table, called "filters to ignore changes".
Column "Character casing" of table "Aspects" would move there.
Additional columns are "white space" and "regular expressions".
-- Alba7 09:25, 21 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Filters 

message: There should be a column about the maximaum lenght of a file (most tools unly support up to 2GB) and how large files are scanned (if both files are loaded into memory as a whole, like in windiff amd winmerge, the maximum file lenght is theoretically only half of the system-memory (in reality less, because some memory is used by the OS and the app istself) and if the application is 32bit, it is also limited to 1GB, because this is the maximum, most x86-OSes can assign to x32-tasks. This problems can be avoided, by only storing the differences in he memory and if there arre too many differences, it would be possible to store the differences in a temporary file). --MrBurns (talk) 00:27, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  large files 

message: Can anyone provide justification for the p4merge license being 'free for personal use'? The tool itself, though it comes with the perforce visual client, when installed alone has no license agreement at all. The perforce website states that you can use downloads for any reason provided you do not modify the software. Dsav (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 21:43, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I've changed the license to 'freeware' since this directly contradicted the Perforce website --Dsav (talk) 01:01, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  p4merge 

message: There is no software in the list to compare two video files or audio files to show which file is the correct one (i.e. storage or download was not 100% correct). The software should show and play the part when they are different). Who know such software and can complete the list?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.173.95.85 (talk) 09:05, 15 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Video / Audio Comparison 

message: It would be helpful to list some structured compare tools such as Compare++, Compare it!; They can detect code structure changes, functions relocation such as moved lines/functions which often occurred when doing code refactoring.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Liuxin4335 (talk • contribs) 06:27, 30 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Would you please list some structured compare tool? 

message: It seems there are some notable missing tools from the list. 
What about KDiff or Tortoise Diff? The new integrated VS diff (not windiff) could be for completeness though it lacks most features.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.89.113.109 (talk) 16:27, 16 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Nobody has come around to add them, you're free to do so if you believe you can significantly contribute to the article. That's generally how these things work — Masklinn (talk)
Also cmp (Unix), which I just discovered as a really bare-bones binary compare utility. 72.48.75.131 (talk) 06:05, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

text: I agree that diffuse should be included. It's the only tool I could find that can compare any number of files.--208.125.94.82 (talk) 21:20, 28 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Missing diff tools 

message: Lazarus is surely a great piece of software and unique in many aspects, I use it a lot myself, but I cannot figure out why it would be listed here as a diff tool. Lazarus is an excellent open source cross platform IDE and RAD studio and while it has many unique features that cannot be found in any of the few other available IDEs of the same caliber the only thing it is still completely lacking is any sort of usable diff tool (just displaying the output of something similar to "diff old new" but only similar and not compatible with it's counterpart patch in a separate editor window does not count for me).
Or was its listing here (and the complete empty row in the features matrix) meant as some sarcastic remark indicating the complete lack of any diffing? I suggest removing this wrong entry.
--82.83.216.185 (talk) 21:15, 4 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Surely you can just remove it (it's apparently been added at 16:47, 22 April 2009 and never been touched since) if you believe it doesn't belong here. — Masklinn (talk) 21:00, 6 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why is Lazarus listed as a diff tool? 

message: Why is Netbeans not listed ?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.35.17.21 (talk) 09:34, 26 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  NetBeans 

message: Do other people feel that the web site DiffChecker is not appropriate here?  It can't really be used in any serious way to do a file merge.  Mgolden (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 21:35, 11 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  DiffChecker? 

message: Contrary to this article,  WinMerge stable release does not seem to support binary compare (hex compare). According to http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/winmerge/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=61 it's only in dev versions. 212.29.231.179 (talk) 09:24, 10 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Still does not support http://forums.winmerge.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=61http://forums.winmerge.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=337. Deleting feature from table. \chAlx (talk) 18:59, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  WinMerge support of Binary comparison 

message: What an irony that not a single of the comparison tools compared in this article could actually be used for comparing the comparison tools. —Kri (talk) 22:40, 29 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparison tools failed to compare comparison tools 

message: Added this back as Vrenator deleted, but this is a real tool and there is no reason not to include it.  An automatic deletion tool to remove what I spent some time adding in is quite rude.  Please read what you delete before deleting!
: I have removed it again - Please read the note at the top of the article when editing,
"This article is limited only to comparison tools that have a separate article on Wikipedia. Please do not add examples  without an existing Wikipedia article. If you want to add a notable comparison tool to this article please write a separate article on the comparison tool first and then link to it from this page."
Please do not keep adding it Vrenator talk 09:40, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: If you go into edit the article you will see the words that I quoted about only adding tools with their own page. All the other additions link to Wikipedia articles. DiffMerge had an article which was deleted in August 2011 because there was no demonstrated notability. If you can provide citations demonstrating notability then you are welcome to create an article first. see WP:WTAF. I am not being "Rash", "Rude" nor am I on a "Power trip" so please could you keep your comments Civil Vrenator talk 10:27, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  DiffMerge 

message: The last time I checked, 2 GB referred to significantly more data than 64 bits  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Authun (talk • contribs) 08:46, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: 64 bits refers to the amount of data addressable by a 64 bit value (i.e., 2^64).  This was fixed in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools&oldid=816501926, but then reverted https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_file_comparison_tools&oldid=816711101 (apparently, because WP:COMPUNITS, huh??) Npostavs (talk) 20:09, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks, Npostavs, for mentioning my old edit and its weird revert. I was actually rather pissed that it was reverted with a stupid reasoning, but I was growing sick and tired of Wikipedia exactly because of these foolish reverts made by dumb and trigger-happy people that don't really look into what they are reverting; so instead of objecting, I just left Wikipedia for a while to let it rot. The problem with this specific revert was of course that the reverter did not look into what I actually did, but only saw part of it, and then reverted the whole thing because a tiny part of it didn't follow the Holy Book, the Manual of Style. The person could have been helpful instead of disruptive by actually adjusting it to Wikipedia's silly standard of not following the standard instead of reverting the whole damn thing. What he did was kind of like reverting an entire helpful addition with the reasoning that it contains a spelling error, instead of simply being helpful and correcting the spelling error. I actually thought my edit was quite helpful in translating the rather non-layman sizes of "64 bit" etc. into actual memory sizes. Laymen cannot be expected to understand how much data 31 or 64 bits can address (Authun illustrated this very well above), and we do not write Wikipedia for specialists; we write for laymen, so writing "31 bits" or "64 bits" is a clear failing from our side. --Jhertel (talk) 23:55, 9 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  diff, diff3 Max Supported File Size 

message: http://www.araxis.com/merge  — Preceding unsigned comment added by SysTom (talk • contribs) 16:22, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: +1, I also miss it from the tables. --94.21.221.129 (talk) 15:51, 2 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  araxis merge 

message: Other features ought to include API.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by SysTom (talk • contribs) 16:24, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  API 

message: ECMerge is missing, maybe because it doesn't have its own wikipedia page either.
If someone wants to take the trouble...
It is quite good, although the latest version is a little old now (september 2014).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gabrolf (talk • contribs) 11:48, 19 February 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  ECMerge 

message: http://semanticmerge.com/ CarlJohanSveningsson (talk) 10:08, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semantic Merge by Plastic 

message: I currently have KDiff3 installed on Windows, and cannot find any way to compare files/folders via FTP. Searching for information online, the only thing I found was that KDiff3 "has support for KDE-KIO (ftp, sftp, http, fish, smb)": https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/kdiff3
I'm not familiar with KDE-KIO; but as I see it, that means KDiff3 does not truly offer FTP support. I think at most, we could mention "supported by OS" in the "FTP support" column, as is done for FileMerge. But I think it's misleading to colour the cell in green, as KDiff3 only seems to support FTP on Linux systems. Tanynep (talk) 19:15, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  FTP support in KDiff3? 

message: I will be the first to admit that this is a very Windows-centric thing, but one feature that that can make a significant difference to the ease of use of a diff tool is integration into Windows Explorer.  As an example, Beyond Compare integrates very well, while WinDiff has no integration at all.  Adding a column to the "Other Features" table to cover this would, IMHO, improve this page.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.198.85.139 (talk) 22:13, 29 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Windows Explorer Integration 

message: Where is Kdiff3? It is super-popular and free. Why it was removed? Is this (bad) joke?..  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.179.70.44 (talk) 04:28, 11 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kdiff3 

message: There seems to be a lack of a function that goes the other way.
Countless tools allow the user to compare two files and produce a 'diff' of the changes between them.
But what if you have only a 'diff' output and want to see the original and changed versions side by side?
Just the 'diff' text is not very readable.
I have put in some real effort to finding a tool to do this and have followed several dead ends
to tools that claim to have this function but actually do not, or that no longer exist in Windows format.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.35.117.25 (talk) 12:42, 7 February 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Viewing Diff Files