What's Different?
Remember the kids puzzles which asked you to spot the differences? They were fun but also frustrating. I remember straring at a picture saying "WHAT'S DIFFERENT!"How does this pertain to development? Well, we don't use an automated source code versioning system here at work (I know, we should). Instead, we make copies of each version of the program. So I will have a folder for each version of the code. Sometimes, we accidentally use the wrong folder, and that makes my life resembles these puzzles. I am puzzling out what changed, when and why.
We have some command-line tools to compare folders, but that only reveals files that have changed. We then have to load the files and do a file comparison with them. Can we say tedious and time consuming?
That tedium was ended the day I found K-diff. K-Diff is a really useful tool that can compare two folders and display all of the differences for you. It highlights the files which have change, and double-clicking them brings up the files side-by-side for easy comparison. It makes comparing differences easier and quicker. It has made my life much easier.
You can find K-Diff here at http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/ It's open source and is available for Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac and anything (in theory) that supports the qt libraries.
