Save your time with WinMerge

Posted by Ruhani Rabin

January 21, 2008

As a Developer you should come along into a situation that you need to compare or merge complex code fragments and Sadly most of us do it with notepad. Well have you seen WinMerge? Remember this century is not about how good you are in code but it's about how can solve your problems.. So let me introduce to you the WinMerge, this program designed for open source developers and by open source developers.. Upgrading from old code to new code can be a real painstaking feature.. So here is WinMerge to save you some times. Lets take a look into WinMerge:

File compare window is basically two files opened to editor into two horizontal panes. Editing allows user to easily do small changes or copy certain parts without need to open files to other editor or development environment. It's a blaze to copy fragments of code from identical files.

Now here is the highlight with left navigator for the entire file.. It can jump from one change to another changed line in a file..

Here are some features:

Visual differencing and merging of text files
Flexible editor with syntax highlighting, line numbers and word-wrap
Handles DOS, UNIX and MAC text file formats
Unicode support
Difference pane shows current difference in two vertical panes
Location pane shows map of files compared
Highlights differences inside lines in file compare
Regular Expression based file filters in directory compare allow excluding and including items
Moved lines detection in file compare
Creates patch files
Shell Integration (supports 64-bit Windows versions)
Rudimentary Visual SourceSafe and Rational ClearCase integration
Archive file support using 7-Zip
Plugin support
Localizable interface via resource DLL
Online manual and installed HTML Help manual