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”.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | // 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"] |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | { "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. 🙂
how to apply settings for FileDiffs
Diff with Tab – FileDiffs on Sublime Text
DiffMerge Window
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.
I use Codelobster for it: http://www.codelobster.com
Will this work for other compare tools? I have compare-side-by-side, and following your instructions, led to a file called SBSCompare.sublime-settings