In praise of Beyond Compare

Dear goodness. Beyond Compare is essential for my dev work, webdesign work, deployment work, debugging work, etc. It is amazing what it will do for the price, and it keeps getting better.

Beyond Compare rocks!

I have been using the tool for years. I am speachless when I see how much time and effort BC saves to me every day. Amazing.

I’ve changed 2 work places in the last 4 years and BC was and still is my best companion regarding merging and comparison. I use WinMerge at home cause it’s free.

I’m with Chris, my allegiance is with ExamDiff Pro. As a standard text file / directory comparison tool they look very similar but ExamDiff Pro’s extensions look like they edge out BC. My favorite is the Word extension. Rather than treating them as binary files, it pre-processes Word files and does a text compare so you can actually see what differs in the Word document. Pretty nice.

http://www.scootersoftware.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=0Board=BC3News

Beyond Compare 3 Professional is coming this year. BC3Pro is a complete re-architecture of the product bringing 3-way merge, syntax highlighting, dynamic recompare, full-screen editing, and much much more. The bang for the buck is going to get bigger fast.

Been using BC many years. Continues to be awesome. It is a real workhorse of an application. Can’t wait for BC3 but hope they don’t over shoot. Part of what makes BC2 so great is its strait forward approach.

I absolutely LOVE BeyondCompare. Honestly, I started my computing life about the same time as the first PC’s really came out (1983), and I really find BeyondCompare to be one of the nicest, and generally most useful, and also visually easiest/nicest programs I have ever used.

I have tried about a dozen other differencing programs over the years, and this is just so far superior, there is not even a contest.

I have a question about Beyond Compare. I work for a large company and we have a huge amount of code. I am new to Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation System, but I am the configuration manager for this. I will still be using Visual Studio 6.0 for our older products.

Our process is to do inspections by comparing the original version (version 0) with the newer version (version 1). But many times the developer has to do rework. Is this tool able to compare the newer version (version 1) of the inspection with another newer one (version 2) with the rework?

Thanks,
kennerlj

I am a licensed user of BC2. I am in need of 3-way comparison and merge. It is crucial to have this feature for version control software, because you will be performing 3-way comparisons and merges in this situation. BC2 cannot become a cimplete replacement for Ratinal CLearCase’s merge manager due to the lack of 3-way comparisons, for example.

What I need even more than 3-way comparison is a diff tool that can parse XML documents and compare/merge them. BC2 does not do this. Does anyone know if Araxis Merge does?

Imagine an XML document that exists on a single line. Try comparing and merging that in BC2, to see how useless it is for XML documents.

use pspad freeware editor to conver one line of xml and reformat it. this tool will make it multi line.
do it with both the files and use Beyond compare! just because you have bad data, it does not make BC a bad tool…
It is great tool!

Just to let you know, there is absolutely nothing wrong or bad with an XML document exsting on a single line. It is used quite frequently. Araxis Merge does not currently support parsing XML documents for comparison, so it would not help in this situation either. In searching, the only diff tool that does is Altova’s diffdog, but that utility is lacking in other areas, IMO.

Sure – I could certainly format the files manually prior to using a diff tool, but if there’s one that does it for me automatically AND reformats it back to the way it was before it made changes, that would be an IDEAL diff tool for my needs.

kennerlj,

Beyond Compare can compare any two text files, show you differences between the two, and allow you to selectively choose which differences to include or exclude to one or both versions you are comparing. Beyond Compare is a great choice for casual users in need of a diff tool. The tool is not perfect, however, and may not be the best choice for Software Engineers.

Some features that would make Beyond Compare even better include:

  • In-line editing (manually editing in BC2 is extremely cumbersome)
  • Customized syntax coloring for source code
  • An improved way to manually align incorrectly matched comparisons (the current way to do it is very cumbersome). No diff tool is going to match things up perfectly, so a quick way to fix it is ideal.
  • The ability to compare and show differences in binary files.

Although the tool is great, these reviews really are ignoring the stuff above missing (except for in-line editing).

@JT

“Just to let you know, there is absolutely nothing wrong or bad with an XML document existing on a single line.”

…except that, for example, it’s unreadable by a human being, like a program on one line.

imak, I agree that it is unreadable. Its intent was to be machine readable, however. Imagine transmitting XML via SOAP. Most developers would transmit machine readable XML. When debugging this code, it would help to have a diff utility that could parse XML.

XML has been around for a long time now. It’s time that diff utilities caught up and supported it correctly, I think.

To the people wanting xml comparison - check the xml tidy extension on beyond compare (available from the beyond compare site).

It uses the xml tidy tool to normalise and indent xml in a standard way, so you can compare two files that are laid out in different ways, for example one on a single line, the other half indented.

you can even play with the xml tidy parameters, and do things like sort the attributes, in case that’s an issue.

To Bob, re xml tidy - good call! took a while to find it - quickest is to go to support tab, click knowledge base articles, entered xml tidy in search, then scroll down… works a treat, thanks.

Just a note, I love BC. But, it doesn’t handle files with hebrew character set. Perhaps a future update can fix this?

3-way merging is to be supported in Beyond Compare 3.

Also, you can download rules from Beyond Compare’s site for Microsoft Word files, etc… There are lots of rules and plug-ins on there, check them out.

http://www.scootersoftware.com/download.php?c=kb_morerules

Beyond compare is the greatest.

The number of improvements in 3.0 are very exciting… as mentioned 3 way merge is in there, along with much improved ftp support, folder comparisons, and a tab interface that supports multiple compares in a single window (each running in parallel, allowing you to have several directory comparisons going at once in the background using multiple tabs).

-Michael (Seattle, WA)

I would totally agree!!!

I’m a developer and our company has had a corporate license for Beyond Compare for about 5 years. I’ve been using it about that long. It’s probably in my top 5 favorite “core tools” that I can’t live without.

Their support is great too if you have to contact them for anything. I just contacted them yesterday to ask about the possibility of a Linux version. It seems one is in beta (for version 3 about to come out) and about ready to be released as well. They sent me a link. I had that answer/link within about 1 hour.

Beyond Compare rocks!