The other day, I was searching for some ways to compare two files(one from production and another from the local development of the same file) in Sublime Text. I found that there is no default tool to compare two files, thats why I installed “FileDiffs“, a package which provides the above needed functionality. What this tool does is: it provides you a result file which contains unified differences from both the compared files with + (Plus) & – (Minus) symbols. Even though it serves the purpose, but for someone who has been using compare tools like WinMerge, or the color-full GUI in Notepad++ editor on Windows, the experience will be horrible.
However a cool feature of this “FileDiffs” package is that, it can integrate with any external diff. tools through command line. So, I installed “DiffMerge“, an free application to visually compare and merge files. Below is the set of settings that integrates “DiffMerge” with “FileDiffs” on “Sublime Text 3”.
// You can set a command like this
// "cmd": ["command", "$file1", "$file2"]
// You can also include other command line parameters like this
// "cmd": ["command", "-parameter1", "-parameter2", "$file1", "$file2"]
{
"open_in_sublime": true,
// diffmerge (DiffMerge)
"cmd": ["/usr/bin/diffmerge", "$file1", "$file2"],
"trim_trailing_white_space_before_diff": false,
"expand_full_file_name_in_tab": true,
"apply_tempfile_changes_after_diff_tool": false
// "limit": 1000
}
How and where to apply these settings ?
- Go to: Sublime Text –> Preferences –> Package Settings –> FileDiffs –> Settings – User
- Copy & paste the above code in the FileDiffs.sublime-settings file.
- Restart Sublime and see the file diffs visually in a nice graphical way. 🙂
Update: “Compare Side-By-Side” package for Sublime Text can be used to side-by-side file comparison & difference in Sublime Text 2 / Sublime Text 3. This works great and easy to set up.
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