Visual Comparer
If you’ve been building web projects or software then you can understand how difficult managing these files can become. The process of merging different source code can be very annoying.
Visual Comparer enables you to compare text files side by side and view the highlighted differences in color. The program not only highlights the line that contains the difference,
but also the individual change, down to a single character. You can the selectively transfer changes from the left to the right or vice versa and have full control and freedom of text editing.
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Comparison panes
One of the main differences of Visual Сomparer from other similar programs is its full-function text editor. You can copy, delete, find and replace the text in Visual Сomparer as you did it in any other text editor. All these possibilities are realized in comparison panes. Each pane represents the content of one file being compared, allowing its edition and merging of different blocks with the other file.
- Margin Bar is area of the margin indicators that provide visual cues to certain actions during the editing or comparing of your source files.
- File information pane - area for representiong of short file information. Detail information, see please here.
- Virtual lines is a special concept in Visual Comparer and means missing lines in the file given. This term appeared in accordance with comparison technology in Visual Comparer. Presence of virtual lines is not effecting the file content, it only shows lack of lines, which present on this place in the other file.
- Splitter. Two Comparison Panes are separated by a "splitter bar" that the user can drag to change the relative sizes of the panes.
- Same lines are lines provided to be equal after comparing.
- Differing lines are lines provided to be equal after comparing.
Each Comparison Pane has its pop-up menu that include some often-used commands. To activate the pop-up menu simply click the right mouse key in edition area. The commands activity depend on the place of activation in the comparison pane. For example if you click on the block of differences, in menu will be accessible merging commands.
If you frequently use commands that are not present in the popup menu you can expand or change it. Visual Comparer supports an adjustment opportunity of context-dependent menus and tool panes.
To make recognition of file differences more convenient and increase your productivity during comparison Visual Comparer has a number of additional actions with Comparison Panes, namely:
- Toggle orientation - switch the panes orientation from vertical to horizontal layout and back;
- Splitter parking - switch the parking of panes splitter cyclically on the right, on the left and in the center of the main window. This opportunity is convenient to use in situations, when line length in one or both panes exceeds the size of seen area. You can temporarily place the splitter in convenient position to see the whole differences;
- Lines numbers - comparison pane supports the displaying of lines numbers for each file. Numbering of lines is made without taking into account virtual lines. It supported the original numbering of lines in files. For recognition convenience each 10-th line is displayed by different color;
- Swap panes - Swaps the left and right panes.
The full-functional text editor
The full-functional text editor does line comparing and allows to carry out additional editing of the text while matching. It is done as conveniently and easily as in the usual text editor.
Features list:
- undoes or redoes previous actions without of limitation on the number of actions;
- bookmarks;
- line number in the margin;
- support of DOS, Unix, Macintosh and mixed "end-of-line" format in text files;
- find and replace with regular expressions support;
- support of text files in Unicode and UTF-8 formats;
- copying of the selected text to the clipboard in HTML format with preserve of syntax highlight.
Search and Replace
'Search and Replace' makes possible for you to search for and replace specified text in the current pane of Visual Comparer and support regular expressions. Find/Replace dialogue works in modeless mode. Therefore you can not only make find and replace but also make editing of the text during of the find and replace.
Strict and exact syntax highlighting
The majority of modern text editing tools possess a syntax highlighting feature of various programming languages. Visual Comparer has this feature as well.
Visual Comparer supports syntax highlighting for the following programming languages:
- HTML and CSS2;
- C and C++ (based on Visual C++ 6.0);
- C# (C Sharp - Visual Studio.NET);
- Visual Basic .NET;
- VBScript .NET;
- JScript .NET (version 7.0 from Visual Studio.NET);
- Borland Delphi 7;
- Perl (version 5.005);
Line matching
Visual Comparer supports char-by-char lines comparison (F12 and Shift+F12 to enable this mode). Unequal chars are marked as red:
You can also reallocate lines in a separate block of differences ("Adjust similar lines"). This feature is based on the "lines similarity" concept:
Pic. 1. Before adjusting
Pic. 2. After adjusting
Comparison Map and quick navigation
For convenient moving and full scope of file differences Comparison Map is intended. It consists from area of differences and scrollbar. Using Comparison Map, you can move quickly through the differences. You can do it both with help of scrollbar and direct cursor positioning. Simply click on required difference area to see necessary difference block.
The scrollbar height of Comparison Map is proportional to the size of a seen part of edited area in Comparison Panes. For convenient use Comparison Map can be placed both at the left and on the right to main window. If you are going to use Comparison Map as alternative to vertical scrollbars of Comparison Panes, you can turn them off. In this case you may need the opportunity of increase the scrollbar width at Comparison Map. All these opportunities are accessible in menu View.
The scrollbar of "Comparison Map" it is synchronized with vertical scrollbars of Comparison Panes. If you scroll "Comparison Map" or one of Comparison Panes they will be scrolled Panes synchronously.
Navigation by differences with synchronization feature
We recommend use keyboard shortcuts to move between differences and they synchronization.
It is more efficient and convenient than using the buttons located on command toolbars.