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diffuse -- a graphical tool for comparing and merging text files

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

For more details see the file COPYING.

What is diffuse?

Diffuse is a graphical tools for comparing and merging text files.

Diffuse is still in early development. It has only been tested on an x86 Linux system but should work under any Unix environment.

Some of diffuse's notable features include:

ability to compare an arbitrary number of files side-by-side (all files listed in the command line arguments are opened side-by-side)
line-matching can be manually corrected by the user (select a line from one pane then right-click on a line from a neighbouring page and choose "Align to Selection" from the menu)
highlighting of character differences
support for UTF-8 encoded unicode
ability to directly edit files being compared (enter edit mode my double clicking on a text pane; exit edit mode by pressing the ESC key)

You can check the newest version and information about diffuse at:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/diffuse

Building from source

Diffuse uses Trolltech's Qt library for its user interface. The Qt header files and build tools need to be present when compiling diffuse. The QTDIR environment variable should point to the Qt installation root. Please see http://www.trolltech.com/ for information about obtaining Qt.

Diffuse also uses some icons from KDE. It expects to find these icons in the /usr/share/icons/default.kde/22x22 directory. Please see http://www.kde.org/ for information about obtaining KDE.

Configure and build diffuse by running the command:

$ qmake -project && qmake && make

This command should create a single executable. Use diffuse by running this executable with the names of the files you wish to compare or merge as command line arguments.

Feedback

Comments, ideas, and bug reports (especially ones including patches) are very welcome.

--
Derrick Moser <derrick_moser@yahoo.com>