What are some good GUI diff and merge applications available for Ubuntu?

What are some alternatives to WinMerge and the pros and cons of each?

3 Answers

The best I like is Meld

There are many choices available though. As a vim fan I find myself using vimdiff, kompare for the kde crowd - there also some paid version that have linux versions like Beyond Compare . The pros/cons depends on what you're looking for/looking to do.

vimdiff is great because you can run it from a terminal, over an ssh connection, and if you already use vim, you get to keep your tools/config options.

Meld has a pretty clean user interface, and does three way and directory diffs. You'll have to try a couple and see which does the job as you're expecting them to do for your own needs.

To install Meld from the Ubuntu repos, you can run:

sudo apt-get install meld

You can then pick the files/folders to compare, and compare them:

Another one is diffuse

It is free, crossplatform (written in python), has source code highlight, can interact with many version control tools.

Kdiff3

Is a pretty good 3 way merge tool.

Some of its features are:

• compares or merges two or three text input files or directories,
• shows the differences line by line and character by character (!),
• provides an automatic merge-facility and
• an integrated editor for comfortable solving of merge-conflicts,
• supports Unicode, UTF-8 and other codecs, autodetection via byte-order-mark "BOM"
• supports KIO on KDE (allows accessing ftp, sftp, fish, smb etc.),
• Printing of differences,
• Manual alignment of lines,
• Automatic merging of version control history ($Log$),
• and has an intuitive graphical user interface.
• Windows-Explorer integration Diff-Ext-for-KDiff3 - shell extension included in installer
  KDE-Konqueror service menu plugin