Thumbs up: Araxis Merge

For a Windows printing system development project, I recently had an occasion to reconcile the differences between to parallel directories of source code, and this was looking to be a daunting tasks. Hundreds of C++ files, makefiles, config files, and the like had to be gone through, with each change potentially being important.

Thankfully, I owned a license to Araxis Merge, and it made the job a breeze. This is a GUI-based visual diff tool, and it goes far beyond the other tools I've seen that will do this (VMerge, for instance). It can show two (or three!) equivalent source files side by side, highlighting what was inserted, deleted, or changed. Each diff can be independently incorporated into the "other" file.

They also can start at the top of an entire directory tree and show the diffs all the way to the bottom, drilling down to any individual file diff. Files of certain types (.obj, .exe, etc.) can be excluded automatically.

It knows how to ignore revision-control $Id$ strings (you can add your own regular expressions to the list).

Overview of file diff

Overview of folder diff

This software is just fantastic: clean look, very fast, incredibly functional. They have a "standard" and "professional", the latter providing the three-way features (which I have not yet used). I can't believe now much time this saved me and how glad I found it several years ago. This is an example of a company that does one thing, and does it really well.

Highly recommended.

Posted by Steve at March 12, 2004 06:59 AM | TrackBack