I have used BBEdit ever since I can remember using a text editor on the Mac, and take for granted its many very powerful features. Although occasionally useful, comparison of directories is aimed more at specialists maintaining Xcode and similar projects.ĭespite FileMerge inevitably being installed here with Xcode, I choose to use the Find Differences… feature in BBEdit instead. You can use an ancestor, and if you want to merge the directories, you need to provide another directory into which to save the merged result. This is almost a three-way comparison, and when FileMerge finds all three files at odds with one another, it puts a red border around a difference to draw attention to it.Ĭomparing directories is essentially performing a series of comparisons between matching files in two directory trees. By specifying the common ancestor to FileMerge, it can select when to take changes from the left or right file. What you then get is a superb comparison between the chosen files, with easy navigation, syntax-based colouring, and the ability to merge in changes wherever you wish.įileMerge is unusual in that it offers two extensions to basic document comparison: ancestors and directory comparison.Īncestors cope with the common event of forking or branching: two different versions are derived from a common ancestor.
If you’d rather run FileMerge another way, then it will open with this dialog, in which you select the files to be compared using the Left… and Right… buttons. Which puts ist in the left view and ist in the right. There are two official ways to open it: one is inside Xcode itself, from the Xcode menu, the other is, bizarrely, a command in Terminal, such as Installing a whole development environment just to get a tool to find differences might seem excessive, but there are many other good reasons to have Xcode and its tools to hand.Īpple used to deliver FileMerge and other Xcode support apps in a separate folder, but they’re now buried away inside the Xcode.app folder, in Contents/Applications, so you’ll probably want to install the app in your Dock, make an alias to it, or prepare some other means of ready access. If you enjoy mixing sudoku with Scrabble, macOS comes with a full implementation of the standard Unix command diff.įor us lesser mortals, there’s a free app, FileMerge, which is bundled with Apple’s Xcode SDK. The first fact to note is that, if you’re a command line wizard, you don’t have to compare files the easy way.
This article looks at Apple’s free FileMerge tool for doing this, and more, and the Find Differences… feature in the Gold Standard text editor, BBEdit. For many of us, similar comparisons need to be made even more often. Whenever Apple releases an update to XProtect’s data files, I have to compare the new with the old to work out what has changed, for instance. Comparing two text files is one of those fundamental tasks which never seems to go away.
0 kommentar(er)
