Monday, June 04, 2007

Free Diff Tool: SourceGear DiffMerge

In the midst of the new products we have just released there is one item which deserves to have a brighter light shown on it:  SourceGear DiffMerge is our new application for comparing files and directories.  And it's FREE!!!

Sorry, the word "free" is another one of those words that is mostly useless, so I'll explain more:

DiffMerge is "free of charge", or as some folks say, "free as in beer".  DiffMerge is not open source nor is it "free" in the Richard Stallman sense of the word.  DiffMerge is a no-cost application that anyone can download and use.  It is not a trial, a demo or an eval.  It is fully functional and fully featured.

Why does the world need another diff tool?

We admit that there are a heckuva lot of diff and merge tools out there already.  Some of them are darn good.  So why did we create another one?

Because we thought ours could be one of the best.

A lot of the diff and merge tools out there are just very basic in their feature set.  Even among the good ones, most of the file comparison tools I've seen involve some kind of compromise.  I lost track of how many times I've said one of the following:

• Yep, that's a great diff tool, but it doesn't do merging.
• Yep, that's a great diff tool, but it only runs on Windows.
• Yep, that's a great diff tool, but it's really expensive.
• Yep, that's a great diff tool, but it has little or no editing capabilities.
• Yep, that's a great diff tool, but you can't customize it much.
• Yep, that's a great diff tool, but coughs up a furball if you give it a Unicode file.

So, we're unveiling SourceDiffMerge 3.0 as our attempt to be the best of the breed.  I'm not sure we've hit the target, but we've come very close.  Highlights include:

• Compare two text files
• Lots of supported character encodings
• Intra-line highlighting of the changed portion of a line
• Three-way merge, including automatic merge whenever possible
• Compare folders
• Cross-platform:  Runs on Windows and Mac OS X.  Oh, and Linux too.
• Full support for editing
• Fully customizable

If you're using our newly-released Vault 4.0 or Fortress 1.0, then you've already got this app.  For everybody else, regardless of whether you are a SourceGear customer or not, I invite you to download DiffMerge and give it a try.  Did we create the best diff and merge tool in the world?  Let me know.