Best Free GUI Diff Tools

Meld – visual diff and merge tool

Meld is a graphical diff viewer and merge application for the Gnome desktop. It supports 2 and 3-file diffs, recursive directory diffs, diffing of directories under version control (Bazaar, Codeville, CVS, Darcs, Fossil SCM, Git, Mercurial, Monotone, Subversion), as well as the ability to manually and automatically merge file differences.

Meld shows differences between two or three files (or two or three directories) and allows you to move content between them, or edit the files manually.

Meld’s focus is on helping developers compare and merge source files, and get a visual overview of changes in their favourite version control system.

Features include:

  • Edit files in-place, and your comparison updates on-the-fly.
  • Perform two- and three-way diffs and merges.
  • Easily navigate between differences and conflicts.
  • Visualize global and local differences with insertions, changes and conflicts marked.
  • Built-in regex text filtering to ignore uninteresting differences.
  • Syntax highlighting (with optional gtksourceview).
  • Compare two or three directories file-by-file, showing new, missing, and altered files.
  • Directly open file comparisons of any conflicting or differing files.
  • Filter out files or directories to avoid seeing spurious differences.
  • Auto-merge mode and actions on change blocks help make merges easier.
  • Simple file management is also available.
  • Supports many version control systems, including Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and SVN.
  • Launch file comparisons to check what changes were made, before you commit.
  • View file versioning statuses.
  • Simple version control actions are also available (i.e., commit/update/add/remove/delete files).
  • Automatically merge two files using a common ancestor.
  • Mark and display the base version of all conflicting changes in the middle pane.
  • Visualize and merge independent modifications of the same file.
  • Lock down read-only merge bases to avoid mistakes.
  • Command line interface for easy integration with existing tools, including git mergetool.
  • Internationalization support.
  • Visualizations make it easier to compare your files.

Website: meldmerge.org
Support: Wiki
Developer: Kai Willadsen
License: GNU General Public License v2.0

Meld

Meld is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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