A Review of WinMerge
By Ryan Hartwich
My current environment consists of a local copy of ColdFusion for development work and separate machines for testing and production. When I am ready for my boss to test my applications, I copy the development code to the testing server and he tests it using a separate test database. Normally this works well. Recently, however, my boss found some logic problems with the application and the easiest way for me to fix the code was to use the test code and database. Over the course of two days, I had updated files in both the test and development environments and needed a way to merge the two sets of changes together.
Comparing and merging two files by hand can be quite tedious. Luckily there are file comparison applications available. They tend to work the same way: Start the application, choose two files to compare, see color coded differences between the files and copy code from one file to the other.
I have been using the open source WinMerge (http://www.winmerge.org) application for a while and have found that it meets my limited needs. The application installs rapidly and has a simple interface for selecting the two files or directories to compare. Once opened, the application highlights the areas of code that differ. On the left hand side of the window are two vertical bars that are white except where there are differences, which are colored a bright orange.
Figure 1: WinMerge's Color Coding Makes It Easy to Tell the Difference
WinMerge is open source and free and allows you to make simple directory comparisons that list unique files in each directory. The program also shows files that may have the same name but are not identical (both text and binary files are compared).
There are a few minor deficiencies in the product. It is weak on side-by-side printing capability (to compare the differences on paper), it only does two-way comparisons (not three-way, which is useful but not that common) and it is for Windows only.
If you need a higher end tool for Windows, check out the $130/270 Araxis Merge (http://www.araxis.com/merge). The Standard edition works for two-way comparisons and the Professional version adds three-way comparison and merging capability.