I used to use Examdiff on windows which is great because it shows diff with respect to the file type like comparing JSOON or sort INI files before comparing.
On Linux I found beyond compare which does everything that Examdiff does, but not as easy as Examdiff, also it is not open source.
So I need a GUI diff
program that:
- Has plugins (file type preset like file sorting)
- does folder compare
- preferably open source
UPDATE: To explain what I mean with plugins I will give two examples
First I will compare the following files:
1.json:
{ "name": "test app", "version": "0.1", "release_date": "2_2_2002", "kernel": "4.14", "username": "root", "password": "1234", }
2.json
{"name": "test app","version": "0.1","release_date": "2_2_2002","kernel": "4.14","username": "root","password": "1234",}
You can see that these JSON files are identical in content except that the first one is indented properly (beautified) while the second one is minified.
So if I run any comparison tool on these files I would get many differences.
Running meld
:
while if I run Examdiff on these files it detects that these are JSON files so it uses a plugin and passes these files to a small utility that beautifies these files before comparing(All this is done under the hood of course).So after comparing it shows that the files are identical
The second example is INI files:
1.ini
[info] ShortName=EN [main] var1=Yes var2=No var3=Abort var4=Ignore var5=OK var6=Cancel var7=Retry var8=All var9=Help
2.ini
[main] var1=Yes var6=Cancel var5=OK var9=Help var2=No var3=Abort var4=Ignore var7=Retry var8=All [info] ShortName=EN
In INI files, the order of the key=value pairs doesn't matter as long as they are in the same sections and empty lines also don't matter
so again running meld
shows a lot of differences:
while running Examdiff shows that they are identical (this time it uses another plugin which relies on a utility called INIsorter)