If you have ever needed to work with multiple version of a file, you’ve probably worked with diff. If you were ever wondering if there was a straightforward GUI compliment to diff, well, Meld might do the trick. At version 1.2.1 Meld offers many features like 3 way compare, directory compare, and a version control browser (subversion, cvs, bazaar-ng, Mercurial). It is a great utility for a developer doing source comparison. The program is written in python and offers a sleek gnome2 based interface that is quite intuitive. Meld offers an easy way to transition code from one version to another with a simple mouse click. This feature alone makes merging branches easy:
Did I also mention that files can be modified in place, and the file comparison will be updated dynamically? Meld will greatly enhance your work efficiency and help eliminate typos while making branch maintenance a breeze. You can grab Meld here, but be sure you have the gnome2 libs, at least python 2.3, pygtk2 and gnome-python2 installed. If you are running Ubuntu, you can do all of that in one line:
~$ sudo apt-get install python-gnome2 libgnome2-0 python-gtk2 python
Next you can unzip the archive and run it. In the example below I actually installed Meld to my /usr/local/bin making it a one line executable from anywhere:
~$ tar -xvzf meld-1.2.1.tar.gz meld-1.2.1/ meld-1.2.1/misc.py ... meld-1.2.1/prefs.py meld-1.2.1/MAINTAINERS ~$ cd meld-1.2.1/ ~/meld-1.2.1$ sudo make prefix=/usr/local install ~/meld-1.2.1$ cd ~$ meld
You are now good to go. Check it out, and let us know what you think!
I am currently using 1.1.5.1, which is the latest version in the Ubuntu synaptic catalogue.
One of the things which irritates me about this version is the way the drop-down list in the Choose File dialogue only show the first ten files I ever compared, rather than the ten most recently opened files. Is this behaviour different in 1.2.1?
Cheers, APC
Sadly APC,
It seems like the issue described is still there. The drop down menu does list 10 files, but not the most recently opened ones. Of course this can be pretty annoying after you have compared more than 10 files. I ended up looking through the list of open bugs and didn’t find anything listed for this particular problem on 1.2 so I opened one up (564162) to track it.
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment!!
Cool. I’ll have to check it out. I’ve been using KDiff3 for a while now and it works fine, but I’m always up to try something newer or better.