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Any suggestions for a better graphical diff tool for OS X?


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I want for a nice diff tool on Mac that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg like Kaleidoscope. Right now I am using one called CompareMerge2 from the App Store which is pretty good.

OSX Diff/Merge tool for text and images

I've actually never used a visual diff tool. Usually I just search the file for ">>>>>>>>>".

Maybe I should check it out.


I often hear KDiff3 recommended in these cases. There are many graphical diff visualizers. I often use the ediff functions in Emacs.

It's just for text files, but opendiff is a pretty nice GUI diff that gets quietly installed as part of the Developer Tools package on OS X:

http://data.agaric.com/node/1101


There's a free and opensource program called `diffpdf` that can compare both visually and by text. It has a GUI and works great, though it doesn't specially handle layout changes. It's included in the normal package sources in most Linux distros:

    apt install diffpdf
    pacman -S diffpdf
https://gitlab.com/eang/diffpdf

Visual diff is very useful to me. I use Meld which works really well for now. But I would love to see a terminal based side-by-side diff view. Does tig have that?

What's the name of this diff tool?

Don't miss https://github.com/dandavison/delta. I use gui diff tools much less nowadays because I can get such great diffs in the terminal.

Sometimes when I want a visual representation I use Apple's FileMerge, but for everything else I just use diff and patch.

Wow, I didn't know about opendiff. Indeed, I will use that when I need something graphical. Cheers!

If we had a decent diff tool for visual elements, then a whole lot of tools would be practical, including the one you suggest.

Certainly a lot of the building blocks for such a system now exist.


What program or tool were you using to see the diffs side by side ?

Visualizing diffs inside the app is also a must-have for me. Fewer clicks = simpler = easier to use = better.

I also note that the apparent keyboard shortcut for "Show Difference" is just "D". Not command-D. Just "D". Not only is this highly unusual (no keyboard modifier like Cmd/Ctrl/Shift/etc.) but it also doesn't work.


I spent a short time trying to find a pretty diff tool, but couldn't really find one to my liking. So just ended up using a bash function that did some decorating on the diff output.

Awesome idea. What's a good non-github way of rendering image diffs?

While Kaleidoscope is Mac only, Diffchecker is cross-platform and still under active development. We just released Dark Mode and Spreadsheet diff is on the way (while Kaleidoscope has seemingly stopped development in late 2017).

It's still a great tool though that works for a lot of people.


Yeah I found that too but it only has a mergetool integration. No diff command listed there.

`diff --color=auto` is nice, but `vimdiff` is superior
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