Thursday, June 26, 2008

Beyond Compare 3 supports 3 way merge, is totally awesome

Beyond Compare 3 is out in beta. It supports 3 way merges!

I found this out literally minutes before I started what turned into a 2 day mergeathon between two large and divergent branches in TFS, with *lots* of merge conflicts to manually resolve, and I can honestly say I'd probably still be merging if I hadn't downloaded it. It's just fantastic.

I'll probably post some screenshots etc... soon, but if you're struggling merging with BC2 and/or the built-in diff/merge support then you really should check it out.

2 comments:

Mitch Wheat said...

Hi Piers, Have you looked at DiffMerge? (http://www.sourcegear.com/diffmerge/) It's free and works well. I haven't used BeyondCompare, but I might give it look to see how it compares.

piers7 said...

Matt asked the same the other night, and the answer was no, so I went and had a look.

DiffMerge's still a big step up from the built-in tool (and it's free!), but I immediately noticed features I used all the time in BC (arbitary selection of merge content lines) that DiffMerge just didn't have. And you wouldn't expect it to: Beyond Compare lives on it's reputation alone, DiffMerge is a tool that's primarly bundled with another product.

So I guess it depends how fully-featured a tool you're after, but I'd gladly pay the $30 US for Beyond Compare *myself* if it was an issue.

PS: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000454.html

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