DirDiff

2006-09-06 21:00  dirdiff    [permalink]

DirDiff started as a tool to check two copies of files in separate directories, either by size or by a different modified date.

From there, I had a go at building my own text-diff. Other diff's show the content of both files, and thus show the content that is equal twice. Sounds like a lot of wasted screen-space to me, so DirDiff shows a single 'flow' and the different parts in different colors. Yes, I know I might have got green and red reversed, but since I use diff primarily to check what I've changed before commit, I like them to show my changes in red. It draws attention.

It can also show the structure of XML documents in a tree view. If you configure the usual attribute names that holds identifying values,  it will use those to show the relevant changes.

If you're using TortoiseSVN, it turns out to be a good alternative diff to use with TortoiseSVN, open the settings and enter "DirDiff.exe %mine %base" for the external Diff Viewer.

Attention: DirDiff internally uses hashes (based on xxHash) without an extra check on the data, and has the algorithm based on a trade-off to improve performance, but risking a sub-ideal common path in some cases. It will show a proper diff in almost all cases, but there's no guarantee that DirDiff will display the most ideal diff in all cases.

DirDiff_646_x32.zip ±1.1MB
DirDiff_646_x64.zip ±1.3MB

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