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Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers

meldmerge.org

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Re: Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers

#91
Is Meld aware of the programming language when it does diffs? The problem I have with many diff tools is that they'll detect block moves without regard for things like method boundaries. Instead of showing the change as moving a method's ordering, with some changes within those methods, most diff tools treat it as just text moves and changes.

So to me, "targeted at developers" should mean something more than what Meld seems to offer (i.e., more than just syntax highlighting and regex filtering).

It's disappointing that programming language-sensitivity isn't more common. [I developed a Visual Basic compare/merge app in the early 90s that did a good job of this because it did extra work to understand the structure of the code, splitting methods and sorting them before comparing.]

Re: Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers

#93

Is Meld aware of the programming language when it does diffs? The problem I have with many diff tools is that they'll detect block moves without regard for things like method boundaries. Instead of showing the change as moving a method's ordering, with some changes within those methods, most diff tools treat it as just text moves and changes. So to me, "targeted at developers" should mean something more than what Mel…

There's the commercial SemanticMerge [0] which might work if it has a parser for the language that you use. According to their docs they currently only support C#, Java, C, C++ and PHP [1].

[0] https://www.semanticmerge.com/

[1] https://www.semanticmerge.com/features

Re: Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers

#95

Is Meld aware of the programming language when it does diffs? The problem I have with many diff tools is that they'll detect block moves without regard for things like method boundaries. Instead of showing the change as moving a method's ordering, with some changes within those methods, most diff tools treat it as just text moves and changes. So to me, "targeted at developers" should mean something more than what Mel…

That sounds like the sales pitch for Semantic Merge: https://www.semanticmerge.com/features/

I haven't tried it, but it does seem like a good direction to be trying to take merge tools.

Re: Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers

#96

Maybe strange question; but which diff and merge tools are not targeted at developers? Edit: what->which

Not in any way affiliated with them but “Snowtrack is the intuitive versioning tool for creatives.”: https://snowtrack.io/about.html

Re: Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers

#98

> On OS X, Meld is not yet officially supported. For pre-built binaries, these OS X builds are the best option. > You can also get Meld from MacPorts, Fink or Brew; none of these methods are supported. Can anyone recommend any of these unsupported options? The best diff GUI tool I've been able to find for OSX is DiffMerge ( https://sourcegear.com/diffmerge/ ) on the App Store, and I'd like to have a tree view for fol…

I'm using the build from Brew, works fine.
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