WinMerge

WinMerge is a free software tool for data comparison and merging of text-like files. It is useful for determining what has changed between versions, and then merging changes between versions.

WinMerge runs on Microsoft Windows.

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 (as of version 2.8.0, UTF-8 files are correctly read without a BOM)
  • Difference pane shows current difference in two vertical panes
  • Location pane shows map of files compared
  • Highlights differences inside lines in file compare
  • Can also generate HTML report with differences highlighted
  • Regular expression-based file filters in directory compare allow excluding and including items
  • Moved lines detection in file compare
  • Ability to ignore whitespace and letter case changes
  • Creates patch files
  • Shell integration (supports 64-bit Windows versions)
  • Rudimentary Visual SourceSafe and IBM DevOps Code ClearCase integration
  • Archive file support using 7-Zip
  • Plug-ins
  • Language localization via plain-text PO files
  • Online manual and installed HTML help manual
  • Generates normal, context, and unified patches.

Codebases and forks

For a planned development of version 3.x no commits have been made to the 3.0 codebase since 2011.

In 2011 a fork of the 2.x codebase titled "WinMerge 2011" was created. This new branch has continued to see active feature and bug fix development. It has also removed ATL/MFC dependencies so that WinMerge can be built using the free Visual C++ Express editions.

See also

References

Uses material from the Wikipedia article WinMerge, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.