WinMerge's filters, four more languages, and files that reload themselves
This release brings in WinMerge's whole filtering side: the Filters dialog with its file, line and substitution filters, the global file filter with its helper menu, and the display filter bar of the folder, file and table windows. The interface now also speaks German, Spanish and Catalan, taken from WinMerge's own translations, and files changed by another application are noticed and reloaded.
Added
- File filters as in WinMerge. One global folder filter, chosen on the selection screen with masks, expressions and WinMerge's preset filters, and built step by step with the "=" helper menu (exclude files or folders, conditions on size, date, attributes, content, line count, on folders and on differences). Tools > Filters is WinMerge's dialog, with its File Filters, Line Filters and Substitution Filters pages; changed line filters apply on OK.
- Display filter bar. View > Display Filter Bar (Ctrl+Shift+L) puts above a file comparison the strip WinMerge has there: a text to find in the lines, or a line expression behind "le:", with the "=" menu to build one (conditions on lines and on differences, transformations, replace lists, Match Inside/Outside, context lines, occurrences). Lines the filter does not hold for are hidden in every pane, and the navigation, copies and searches go by the lines that show. The table comparison has the bar as well, with WinMerge's header menu (first line as headers, auto-fit, filter by column). The folder window's bar takes a mask or a filter expression and hides the items it does not hold for, with the "=" menu to filter by comparison result or by a column.
- Compare options complete. Options > Compare > General now has every option of WinMerge's page (codepage and comment differences, missing trailing EOL, line breaks, indent heuristic, unhighlighting ignored differences), and OK recompares the open comparisons.
- Files that change under you. A file updated by another application is noticed when the window comes to the front and reloaded, with WinMerge's "Auto-reload modified files" option under Options > General and its question before an edited file is overwritten.
- German, Spanish and Catalan. Each catalog takes WinMerge's own translation wherever WinMerge has the text, and LibreMerge's own texts are translated in the same vocabulary. They are new and have not been reviewed by native speakers yet: corrections are very welcome.
- The project's pages in the Help menu: LibreMerge on GitHub, Report a Problem and Help Translate. After some days of use the selection screen asks once, in a small strip, for a star on GitHub; it goes away for good at a click, and nothing reaches the network.
Changed
- The selection screen's folder filter field is the global file filter, as in WinMerge; the old per-window mask is taken over the first time.
- Closing the window, or quitting, now offers to save every comparison with unsaved changes, as WinMerge does.
- The status line of a pane reads "Ln / Col / Ch" in English again.
Fixed
- Check boxes in the lists of the Options and Filters dialogs were invisible on macOS 27.
- A line that only one side has at the end of the file is now the whole difference, and an empty last line counts as a line.
- A filter's "contains" finds its text in any case, as WinMerge's does.
- A folder mask could end in a slash without breaking the filter, and the file filter no longer reloads in a loop.
- The accelerator letters of the menus are unique in every translation.
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