Best visual diff tool on OS X
- modified:
- reading: 2 minutes
If you know one please tell me.
For the last couple of months I was trying various options for doing diffing and merging on Mac with git
and perforce
.
Perforce itself has pretty good merging tool p4merge
and people already know how to setup it with git
. It is good, but feels slow and does not allow to do dirs diffing (at least I don’t know how to do that).
The other option which I was using for a while is FileMerge
(opendiff
). Also good tool. You can find some articles about how to set it up with git, like Integrating Git with a Visual Merge Tool, this article also tells about other tools which you can use with git.
Strange that I did not see it anywhere in articles (maybe it is one of the new features in git) that you can use -d, --dir-diff
with difftool. This is the description of this option
Copy the modified files to a temporary location and perform a directory diff on them. This mode never prompts before launching the diff tool.
For example by using it with opendiff
git difftool -d -t opendiff
You can get the list of all modified files in FileMerge window
After that just double click on files in the list to see the diff.
In conclusion I would just say - these two tools are good, but both require some time from you for gluing them with tools you use.
If you want easier way - buy Kaleidoscope. Yes, it is expensive for the diff/merge tool. But yes, it is worth it. Why? Because it requires only 3 minutes to set it up with almost anything, just check Kaleidoscope integration window