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Meld is a visual diff and merge tool, targeted at developers. It allows users to compare two or three files or directories visually, color-coding the different lines. Meld can be used for comparing files, directories, and version controlled repositories.
The file types addressed by individual file comparison apps varies but may include text, symbols, images, audio, or video. This category of software tool is often called "file comparison" or "diff tool", but those effectively are equivalent terms — where the term "diff" is more commonly associated with the Unix diff utility.
In computing, the utility diff is a data comparison tool that computes and displays the differences between the contents of files. Unlike edit distance notions used for other purposes, diff is line-oriented rather than character-oriented, but it is like Levenshtein distance in that it tries to determine the smallest set of deletions and insertions to create one file from the other.
Beyond Compare is a cross-platform proprietary data comparison utility. The program is able to compare files and multiple types of directories , as well as archives . [ 1 ] Beyond Compare can be configured as a difftool and mergetool of version control systems , such as git .
Displaying the differences between two or more sets of data, file comparison tools can make computing simpler, and more efficient by focusing on new data and ignoring what did not change. Generically known as a diff [ 1 ] after the Unix diff utility , there are a range of ways to compare data sources and display the results.
Xdelta is a command line program for delta encoding, which generates the difference between two files. This is similar to diff and patch, but it is targeted for binary files and does not generate human readable output. It was first released in 1997. [3] The developer of Xdelta is Joshua MacDonald, who currently maintains the program.
This enables users to merge the sets of changes represented by the two newer files. This can be enabled using a command like this: diff3 mine older yours. This is like subtracting the file older from the file yours and adding the result to the file mine, or as merging into mine the changes that would turn older into yours.
tkdiff is a graphical diff viewer based on the Tk framework. [1] It is capable of inter-operating with source-control systems like CVS and Subversion to show the differences between the local copy and the repository version. Such a line-by-line comparison is often considered to be good software engineering practice before committing code changes.