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Kompare your sources

Kompare is a very useful piece of software and I could hardly live without it. It really good when you need to visually compare two source trees or simply two files. You can also use it to apply differences to one of the files. There are three things that I don’t like about it:

  1. It only allows to apply changes in one direction. The excuse might be that it makes sure you don’t change the file you don’t want. Other tools I’ve seen (WinMerge) simply have a checkbox saying “read-only” on both sides, so you can easily decide which one of “source” and which is “destination”
  2. The other thing is that many times I have changes in both files at same places. Kompare selects a large chunk of code as a single section. What I’d like is to be able to select some lines from that chunk and only add those to the destination.
  3. As I wrote, I make changes to both files at same place. Sometimes I just need to add a line from “source” without overwriting the “destination” file. However, that doesn’t seem to be possible with Kompare.

There are great development tools on Linux, but they really need some polish to be excellent tools.

Milan Babuškov, 2007-02-12
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