First, What is WinMerge?
It’s a Windows app that compares two folders or two drives or just two files and allows you to synchronize between them. It’s great when you need to sync two folders or two drives and all the child folders underneath them. It can sync one way (from one folder to another) or both ways, to make sure all files in both locations exists, identically, between the two when the sync operation is over.
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It also lists all the files between the two locations and tells you whether they’re the same, have differences, or exist in one location and not the other.
For files that exist in both locations, but are different, you can double-click and it will open both files, side by side, highlighting the differences, allowing you to merge individual (or all) changes from one file to the other.
Why would you want WinMerge?
Ever have a hard drive start going bad? If you’ve tried to copy files using Windows Explorer you’ll find that it usually fails at some security warning or some unreadable file and quits. Once that happens, you’ll never be able to continue with Windows Explorer. You can only start over, and if you’re copying a large amount of data, that can take days or weeks of babysitting and it’ll only finish if it starts and ends successfully in one session. That will almost never happen.
With MinMerge, you can start with a comparison between the source and the destination, then tell it to just copy what’s different. If it fails (and it can), you can do another comparison, which will yield only the files that haven’t copied yet, and continue from there. Eventually, it WILL get done.
Where can you get WinMerge?
From here: http://WinMerge.org.
What else besides backing up dying drives?
The concept of file comparisons has an unlimited use. I’m just listing a few here.
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Ever Changing Legal Agreements on software
Software agreements, specifically with online financial web sites, are constantly changing. For example, one of my credit cards (Citi) has an awesome feature, “Virtual Credit Card Numbers” that lets me go on their web site and generate a new credit card number for any purchase and put limits on how much can be charged and bring the expiration date much closer on the card, as well as close a virtual card #. I’ll write another article on that feature, but relating to WinMerge,.. When I use their web based version of the tool (they have a downloadable one too), it forces me to read and agree to their legal agreement EVERY TIME! If you’re one of those people that just automatically clicks, “I accept” on all legal agreements, you really really really really really really should stop doing that. If you start reading them, you’ll find many, if not most of them have things that bind you to ridiculous things, beyond the term of your contract. You’re carving yourself into a hole. Since I’m one of those people that actually cares about my freedoms and not locking myself into unreasonable agreements, I actually do read these agreements… EVERY TIME! Of course, if I read the whole thing every time, I’d be spending 1/2 my life reading legal agreements. Instead, I copy and paste the agreement into a text file. Every time a new version is presented to me, I copy and past it into a new text file, in the same folder, then I’ll use WinMerge to compare the two. It automatically highlights the lines that have changed (if any). Then I can see if they’ve changed anything to something I do NOT agree to. So far, they haven’t. Usually, there are no changes, but when there are, it’s just in how they choose to name themselves in the agreement. But, that’s just with CitiCards. Others are different. Also, Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader is another one that’s been prompting all of us, on almost a daily basis with new versions to install, requiring that we acknowledge and agree to a new agreement, every freaking day. Don’t dismiss these agreements. You should be aware that a lot of companies, even well known ones, will use these software updates as a façade to trick you into agreeing to new language that they know you’re not going to read. Speaking of the Adobe updates, you should read this article:
Sick and Tired of Adobe Reader Updates?
So, WinMerge makes finding differences in the repeatedly offered agreements from the same source realistic and easy.
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Programming
If you’re a programmer, and you’re NOT using some kind of diff tool, you probably haven’t been programming for very long. I don’t have to tell any of you experienced programmers how important diff tools are. For that reason, I’m not going to spend any time trying to convince you programmers that a diff tool is necessary. Instead, I’ll harp about how nice this one is compared to others I’ve used. It also easily integrates with Visual SourceSafe and the Subversion tools, including, but not limited to:
- Tortoise SVN
- Ankh
Speaking of Subversion, here are some articles that should help you get started (or even use it to a fuller extent):
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