Text Compare is a compact GNOME application for comparing an old and new block of text in a focused desktop interface. It is useful for quick checks of prose, configuration snippets or source code where a larger editor or version-control client would be unnecessary.
The comparison can operate at different levels of detail, letting the user choose how the input should be tokenised. It can also update the comparison while text is being edited, which makes small revisions easy to inspect as they are made.
Internally, the application uses jsdiff, an implementation of Myers’ difference algorithm.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Compare old and new text in a dedicated graphical interface.
- Choose characters, words, lines or sentences as the comparison token.
- Use coarser line or sentence comparisons for larger bodies of text.
- Enable or disable case sensitivity.
- Enable real-time comparison so results update as the text changes.
- Use jsdiff to calculate textual differences.
- Switch between dark, light and system appearance modes.
- Integrate with the GNOME desktop through its GTK-based interface.
- Keep the workflow deliberately focused on text comparison rather than broader editing features.
Text Compare is written in JavaScript. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| GUI Diff Tools | |
|---|---|
| Meld | Graphical diff viewer and merge application for the Gnome desktop |
| Kompare | KDE diff tool supporting a variety of diff formats |
| Diffuse | Tool for merging and comparing text files |
| TkDiff | Graphical front end to the diff program |
| objdiff | Local diffing tool for decompilation project |
| KDiff3 | Text difference analyzer for up to 3 input files |
| xxdiff | File and directories comparator and merge tool |
| RustDiff | Semantic JSON and XML diff tool |
| RCompare | File and directory comparison toolkit |
| Text Compare | Compare old and new text |
| Image Compare | Side-by-side image comparison tool for spotting differences |
| gap | Simple native graphical utility for comparing text files |
| meld-rs | Visual diff and merge tool for comparing files and directories |
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