App: Compare
Developer: Amsterdamsoft LLC
Genres: Developer Tools, Utilities

A tool needed by all developers, AmSo Compare lets you perform side-by-side comparison and merge of your directories, files, and their content.  It lets you see changes down to the character level and copy changes between two or more different versions of a file as needed.  It allows for text wrapping and can ignore file formatting, forgiving differences between line wraps, indentation, line lengths and other programmer coding preferences such as where they put the opening braces after an if statement.  It features a powerful inline editor for text and hex files, configurable rules based comparison, and supports N-Way comparisons and automated operations such as code merge, and file sync/update/mirroring.

This well designed application features a clean interface with easy to understand controls and icons.  Just select or drag-and-drop in two or more items onto it and you're ready to compare and merge.  It also remembers all recent items for each side so you can perform repeated comparisons easily.

COMPARISONS:

• Folder/Text Compare  
• N-Way Folder/Text Compare  
• N-Way Folder/Text Merge
• N-Way Folder Sync
• Hex Compare  
• Image Compare
• Structured (XML, JSON) Compare
• Time Machine Compare (non-APFS)

FEATURES:

• Side by side comparison with overview
• N-Way folder comparison feature auto-alignment of files
• N-Way text comparison feature N-way operations
• Multiple viewers such as Text (source code), Hex, and image comparison
• Inline editing or line by line operations within both Text and Hex comparisons
• Filtering of lines based on similarity (same, different) or include/exclude based on plain text or RegEx comparison
• Inline display of bytes as UTF8, ASCII, Integer and Decimal point data, (little and big endian)
• Merge multiple sets of changes in folder structures or text files.
• 3-Way folder merge with ancestor in the center and N-Way folder merge with ancestor in the side
• Manual copy, and copy to Ancestor/Branches operations
• Automatic merge, with merge to Ancestor, branches, or a merge folder/file
• Detection and pairing of JSON and XML arrays
• Configurable comparison rules.

SPECIAL OFFER:

For the time being time this major release of AmSo Compare (version 2.0) is available at a significant discount. 

NOTES:

• N-Way operations are generally limited by display area.
• Hex comparison is only suitable for binary files that are similar to each other.
• AmSo Compare works within the MacOS sandbox giving you full access control. It also minimizes use of third party libraries, significantly reducing chance of exposure to misbehavior by a buggy external libraries.

Release notes:
This version corrects a problem where the wrapped Text Compare could freeze on resizing of the app window.

This version also makes changes that allows new APFS Time Machine volumes to handled better and added correctly when dragged and dropped to the app.  (At this time visibility into such volumes is limited by the operating system and hence comparisons only work for traditional Time Machine backups.  You can however compare to a specific APFS Time Machine backup by opening it in Finder and comparing it's content in Folder Compare or Text Compare modes)