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What are some alternatives to WinMerge and the pros and cons of each?

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3 Answers 3

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The best I like is Meld

There are many choices available though. As a vim fan I find myself using vimdiff, kompare for the kde crowd - there also some paid version that have linux versions like Beyond Compare . The pros/cons depends on what you're looking for/looking to do.

vimdiff is great because you can run it from a terminal, over an ssh connection, and if you already use vim, you get to keep your tools/config options.

Meld has a pretty clean user interface, and does three way and directory diffs. You'll have to try a couple and see which does the job as you're expecting them to do for your own needs.

To install MeldMeld app page from the Ubuntu repos, you can run:

sudo apt-get install meld

You can then pick the files/folders to compare, and compare them: enter image description here enter image description here

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  • I use meld a lot, it's support for svn, mercurial and git is great.
    – tutuca
    Aug 23, 2010 at 15:03
  • Meld is awesome, its included as the default merge tool in RabbitVCS
    – TheLQ
    Aug 24, 2010 at 3:13
  • 2
    mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Meld describes some stability issues and notes the lack of (auto) merging features. Sep 29, 2010 at 10:39
  • I must say that this one pulls in a LOT of dependencies: libbonoboui2-0 libbonoboui2-common libglade2-0 libgnomecanvas2-0 libgnomecanvas2-common libgnomeui-0 libgnomeui-common libgtksourceview2.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-common python-glade2 python-gnome2 python-gtksourceview2 python-pyorbit
    – Bram
    Jul 23, 2014 at 2:33
  • Note that current Meld in Ubuntu has a serious bug with remote files:
    – Jaime M.
    Jul 3, 2015 at 9:22
29

Another one is diffuse

It is free, crossplatform (written in python), has source code highlight, can interact with many version control tools.

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  • 4
    I was looking for a diff tool that would allow pasting bits of text into the right and left panes. This is the first one I found. +1
    – Bojangles
    Nov 27, 2012 at 14:13
  • 1
    +1 as this solves my problem where I'm running LXDE and Lubuntu. I love Meld, but would have to install a bunch of gnome libraries which would defeat the purpose. Nov 2, 2014 at 10:13
  • 2
    Supports drag-n-drop unlike Meld. May 26, 2016 at 19:48
  • 2
    Cannt compare folders I guess
    – Siddharth
    Nov 25, 2016 at 10:31
  • 1
    (+) allows to paste text into window panes, but (-) does not word wrap, and (-) latest release is 0.4.8 from 2014-07-18, so development probably is indefinitely on hold.
    – marianoju
    Jul 26, 2018 at 10:25
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Kdiff3

Is a pretty good 3 way merge tool.

alt text

Some of its features are:

  • compares or merges two or three text input files or directories,
  • shows the differences line by line and character by character (!),
  • provides an automatic merge-facility and
  • an integrated editor for comfortable solving of merge-conflicts,
  • supports Unicode, UTF-8 and other codecs, autodetection via byte-order-mark "BOM"
  • supports KIO on KDE (allows accessing ftp, sftp, fish, smb etc.),
  • Printing of differences,
  • Manual alignment of lines,
  • Automatic merging of version control history ($Log$),
  • and has an intuitive graphical user interface.
  • Windows-Explorer integration Diff-Ext-for-KDiff3 - shell extension included in installer
    KDE-Konqueror service menu plugin
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  • I love Kdiff3 and I have used it for years, but it uses Qt and sometimes can get weird in non-KDE environments. That said, it may work better or worse for some people :)
    – jocull
    Oct 24, 2018 at 17:10

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