Folder comparison, the WinMerge way
This release grew out of @KrokusPokus's comparison of LibreMerge and WinMerge in #7: the folder comparison now offers WinMerge's compare methods and View filters, and a bug found on the way made it honor the ignore options. Thank you!
Added
- Compare methods. WinMerge's seven ways of deciding that two files are equal: Full Contents (the default), Quick Contents, Binary Contents, Modified Date, Modified Date and Size, Size and Existence. Pick the default under Options > Compare > Folder, or click the method shown on the right of a folder comparison's status bar to switch and recompare at once, as in WinMerge.
- View menu filters. Show or hide identical, different, left/middle/right unique, skipped and binary items, plus the 3-way submenu (only the left, middle or right side different or missing). Each folder comparison keeps its own set, saved with WinMerge's defaults; the status line tells how many items the filters hide. In tree mode a folder stays visible while something inside it is shown.
- Options laid out like WinMerge's. The category list is now WinMerge's page tree (General; Compare with General and Folder under it; Backup Files), every option sits on WinMerge's page and at its position, the title names the open page ("Options (Compare > Folder)"), and Defaults resets the current page only.
Fixed
- Folder comparisons honor the ignore options. Full Contents compared every file byte by byte, so the whitespace, case, blank line and EOL options and the line filters had no effect on folder results. Files up to 4 MB are now compared as text, up to 64 MB with Quick Contents and larger ones byte by byte, WinMerge's limits, and the Result column names the file type: "Text files are different", "Binary files are identical".
- The AppImages run on glibc 2.35 again (Ubuntu 22.04, Mint 21, Fedora 36). Since 0.9.3 the bundled libarchive needed glibc 2.36; it is now built without that one dependency. Found by AppImageHub's test (AppImage/appimage.github.io#3863).
- No console noise. Started from a terminal, a folder comparison no longer prints "Binary files ... differ" for every binary pair.
Changed
- Files the file mask leaves out are hidden by default, as in WinMerge; View > Show Skipped Items lists them again.
- The .bak backup switch moved from General to Options > Backup Files, where WinMerge has it (your setting is kept).
Downloads
- macOS: universal dmg (Intel + Apple Silicon, macOS 12+), also
brew install --cask iagodpassos/tap/libremerge - Linux: AppImage for x86_64 and arm64 (any distro with glibc 2.35+, nothing to install), also
brew install --cask iagodpassos/tap/libremergewith Homebrew on Linux