Good free or paid merge software that edits two similar files?

W

Weng Tianxiang

Hi,
Recently I am asked to update several my projects. A lot of works has
to be made, comparing old code and new code and replace old one with
new one.

I found that WinMerge is of great value in this respect. I would like
to thank those people who developed the free software to let me use it
and dramatically to increase my job efficiency and reliability.

Thank you, WinMerge software designer.

I wonder if there is better merge software better than WinMerge, free
or paid?

If you know, please let me know.

Weng
 
M

Markus Svilans

Weng said:
Hi,
Recently I am asked to update several my projects. A lot of works has
to be made, comparing old code and new code and replace old one with
new one.

I found that WinMerge is of great value in this respect. I would like
to thank those people who developed the free software to let me use it
and dramatically to increase my job efficiency and reliability.

Thank you, WinMerge software designer.

I wonder if there is better merge software better than WinMerge, free
or paid?

If you know, please let me know.

Weng

The merge tool that comes with TortoiseSVN is quite useful. It can show
the old and new files side by side, and colour highlight any
differences (changed lines, deleted lines, new lines, etc.). I have
found it very useful in the past.

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Regards,
Markus.
 
W

Weng Tianxiang

Hi Markus,
Thank you. I will try to use the tool and compare which one is better.

Weng
 
C

colin

I thought that all apps like this tried to be better than araxis,
allthough I also use minmerge at home.

Colin
 
C

charles.elias

Weng said:
Hi,
Recently I am asked to update several my projects. A lot of works has
to be made, comparing old code and new code and replace old one with
new one.

I found that WinMerge is of great value in this respect. I would like
to thank those people who developed the free software to let me use it
and dramatically to increase my job efficiency and reliability.

Thank you, WinMerge software designer.

I wonder if there is better merge software better than WinMerge, free
or paid?

If you know, please let me know.

Weng

I use MultiEdit (not free) for this purpose and it is excellent. It is
a highly customisable text editor that I used extensively for my VHDL
projects.

Charles
 
D

David R Brooks

Weng said:
Hi,
Recently I am asked to update several my projects. A lot of works has
to be made, comparing old code and new code and replace old one with
new one.

I found that WinMerge is of great value in this respect. I would like
to thank those people who developed the free software to let me use it
and dramatically to increase my job efficiency and reliability.

Thank you, WinMerge software designer.

I wonder if there is better merge software better than WinMerge, free
or paid?

If you know, please let me know.
I use Beyond Compare. It's not free, though.
 
N

Nial Stewart

I have found Beyond Compare to be beyond comparison :)

It'll let you do a diff on directories, then drill down into the
directories to see which files have changed. You can then do
a diff on the files where it highlights the the differences in
lines allowing you to jump to the next diff and copy the changes
from one file to the other. It's the best manual merge tool I've
used (although I haven't used many).

When highlighting the differences (in files and directories)
there are filters you can set up to ignore unimportant differences
(white space, empty lines etc), show only the differences etc.

You can also select the two files or directories to be compared
in windows explorer with a left mouse click to launch a comparison.

You can set up different 'sessions' of file or directory comparison
so when you launch it you can quickly select and run a comparison.
If you do a directory comaprison you can select to update one
to the other with one button, this lets you do a quick uncremental
backup of recent changes to a remote server/directory.


It's one of those utilities that would stop me moving to Linux.



Nial.
 
M

Marcus Harnisch

Weng,

I guess nobody has mentioned (X)Emacs+Ediff yet. It makes only sense
with text-based files of course.

One highlight worth mentioning is the ability to take full advantage
of the editing capabilities and syntax highlighting (as well as email,
news-reading, doctor...) of (X)Emacs.

-- Marcus
 
D

dalai lamah

Un bel giorno Weng Tianxiang digitò:
I wonder if there is better merge software better than WinMerge, free
or paid?

The best I've ever tried is Araxis Merge (definitely not free).
 
W

Weng Tianxiang

Hi,
Now I have several options: (I don't care if it is free or paid,
because it is a company project, not personal one). The drawback of
WinMerge is its search function incompleteness during two file
comparison: During two file comparison, what I want most is a function
that uses two user-defined fast keys to search forth and back for
keyword different appearances and to find their differences between 2
versions. With WinMerge, there is no fast key definition for search.
When entering Ctrl+F, it pops a window to search for. If one is found,
you must enter Ctrl+F again to search next, ...

For example, if I define F3 key is to search forward, F4 key is to
search backward. After first highlighting a keyword, then pressing F3,
it would go to next key word appearance, or pressing F4, it would go to
next keyword appearance backward. Their implementation is not
difficult, but greatly reduce the timing to do search.

To relieve my pressure, can you please tell me whether or not the tools
you suggested and preferred have the functions?

Thank you.

Weng


AxisCompare, Compare,
 
P

Paul Leventis

I would highly recommend the *free*, multi-OS Perforce Visual Merge
Tool (P4Merge -- http://www.perforce.com/perforce/products/merge.html)
This is a true three-way merge tool, which is what you want when you
are doing multi-user code development.

You give the tool two or three versions of the code. Two-way merge is
exactly as with any other tool. However, it's three way merge where
P4Merge really shines. You supply the "Base", "Left", and "Right"
files to it. The Base is the file you started with before making your
changes. Left is your file. And Right is the other file someone else
has created -- they've made changes (starting from base) at the same
time as you were making your changes. It will then do a correct merge,
and it does an excellent job flagging conflicts.

This is the tool many of ourdevelopers use for merging, and in my
experience, it is signficantly better (fewer mistakes, better conflict
identification) than many other tools.

Regards,

Paul Leventis
Altera Corp.
 
C

charles.elias

Weng said:
Hi,
Recently I am asked to update several my projects. A lot of works has
to be made, comparing old code and new code and replace old one with
new one.

I found that WinMerge is of great value in this respect. I would like
to thank those people who developed the free software to let me use it
and dramatically to increase my job efficiency and reliability.

Thank you, WinMerge software designer.

I wonder if there is better merge software better than WinMerge, free
or paid?

If you know, please let me know.

Weng

I use Multi-Edit (not free) for editing and comparing text files. It
is excellent for both purposes.

Charles
 

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