Diff & Merge Tools
To understand what happened in a project, you need to inspect changes. A diff tool application can help you examine these changes more easily.
Diff & Merge Tools featured image

Diff & Merge Tools

To understand what happened in a project, you need to inspect changes. And since changes are represented as "diffs", it's crucial to be able to understand these diffs.

While the command line is the easiest way to output diff data, it can't go very far in making it easy to read:

$ git diff
diff --git a/css/about.css b/css/about.css
index e69de29..4b5800f 100644
--- a/css/about.css
+++ b/css/about.css
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+h1 {
+  line-height:30px; }
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/css/general.css b/css/general.css
index a3b8935..d472b7f 100644
--- a/css/general.css
+++ b/css/general.css
@@ -21,7 +21,8 @@ body {

 h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {
   color:#ffd84c;
-  font-family: "Trebuchet MS", "Trebuchet"; }
+  font-family: "Trebuchet MS", "Trebuchet";
+  margin-bottom:0px; }

 p {
   margin-bottom:6px;}
diff --git a/error.html b/error.html
deleted file mode 100644
index 78alc33..0000000
--- a/error.html
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,43 +0,0 @@
- <html>
- 
-   <head>
-     <title>Tower :: Imprint</title>
-     <link rel="shortcut icon" href="img/favicon.ico" />
-     <link type="text/css" href="css/general.css" />
-   </head>
-

A diff tool application, in contrast, is dedicated to just this single job: helping you understand diffs more easily. It uses colors, special formatting, and even different arrangements (side-by-side, combined in a single column, etc.) to achieve this:

Some of these tools can even help you solve merge conflicts. Especially in this situation, you'll quickly come to appreciate a tool that helps reduce complexity and avoid mistakes.

Today, there are lots of great tools on the market. Below is a short list to give you an overview.

Mac OS X

Windows

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