Back in the days, Microsoft Visual Studio came with a nice little tool called WinDiff. Everytime I created a new release of software, I would run WinDiff and compare the current source code files with the ones for the previous version. I would see all the changes I made. Likewise in a company a manager could review all the changes an employee has made.
I did this to check to see what exactly I had done and so I could review all the new code I had written for mistakes.
Well eventually Microsoft in their wisdom removed WinDiff from Visual Studio. So what’s a programmer to do now?
I’ve found a nice little replacement for WinDiff called TextDiff available from the website https://compare-text-files.com/. I just point it to my current set of files and to my old ones and it runs along and points out all the new files, the removed files and the changed files. For each pair of modified files, I can double-click the entry and it automatically does a “diff text” on them. It works like magic. I even reordered some class methods and it dutifully picked out they were rearranged rather than newly added. I can’t recommend this enough. It has saved me hours of time.
It seems full of hidden features. I also managed to compare a pair of Microsoft Word documents, although it only seems to compare the text part of them.
It has a lot of very useful options. Its ability to just show the differences and leave out the unchanged text is really very useful. If you just want to see the differences and nothing else, then this software utility is worth its weight in gold!
Kaira On Software 