KDiff3 - Home

Author: Joachim Eibl

• compares or merges two or three text input files or directories,
• shows the differences line by line and character by character (!),
• provides an automatic merge-facility and
• an integrated editor for comfortable solving of merge-conflicts,
• supports Unicode, UTF-8 and other codecs, autodetection via byte-order-mark "BOM"
• supports KIO on KDE (allows accessing ftp, sftp, fish, smb etc.),
• Printing of differences,
• Manual alignment of lines,
• Automatic merging of version control history ($Log$),
• and has an intuitive graphical user interface.
• Windows-Explorer integration Diff-Ext-for-KDiff3 - shell extension included in installer (originally by Sergey Zorin: see also Diff Ext)
• KDE-Konqueror/Dolphin service menu plugin
• Simplified integration with IBM-Rational-Clearcase for Windows (Details).
• Read what else is special in a short abstract (PDF).

• KDE4
• Any Un*x that is supported by the Qt-libs from qt-project.org,
• MS-Windows.
• Apple Mac OSX binary available. (0.9.98)
• In theory any platform for which Qt-libs work (Qt4 or Qt5).

• Interface: az, bg, br, ca, cs, cy, da, de, el, en, en_GB, es, et, fr, ga, gl, hi, hu, is, it, ja, ka, lt, nb, nl, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, ru, rw, sr, sr@Latn, sv, ta, tg, tr, uk, zh_CN
• Documentation: en
• Documentation (PDF): en, da, de, es, et, fr, it, nl, pt, sv,

Installation:

tar xvfz filename.tar.gz

and follow the instructions in the README-file.

News:

2014-07-04: Version 0.9.98

• Text rendering now with QTextLayout fixes the following issues
  • Correct handling for variable width fonts.
  • Corrected display of highlighted text with Qt4.8.x on Ubuntu and Mac.
  • Improved handling of texts with both right to left and left to right languages (mixed Arabic and western texts).
  • Improved handling of Chinese and Japanese.
  • Whitespace characters are now shown as dots for spaces and arrows for tabs, and not only in differences.
• Bugfixes.

For the complete list of changes and checksums see the Release Message

2013-02-14: Two Videos by myself (not exactly new, but previously unpublished)

• Comparing files
• Merging files

2013-02-12: Video reviews

• By Nat Dunn on Youtube
• By George Norman (FindMySoft)

2012-08-12: Version 0.9.97

• Memory usage optimized for comparison of large directories.
• In overview for two way diff show if only one side contains text.
• If text is selected in either input or output window use that in Find dialog.
• Command line option --cs doesn't change the config value permanently anymore.
• Windows 64 bit specific installer.
• Bugfixes.

For the complete list of changes and checksums see the Release Message

2011-09-03: Version 0.9.96

• KDiff3FileItemActionPlugin : Context menu that also works in Dolphin (for KDE>=4.6)
• Detect encoding specified in xml header or html "meta" tag.
• Warn if conversion errors appear (Invalid characters due to wrong encoding).
• Translation update.
• Bugfixes.

For the complete list of changes see the ChangeLog and the Release Message and MD5 sums.

2011-03-23: Blog by Marla Parker

A very nice user story about KDiff3.

2010-06-30: Binary package for OS2 created by Silvan Scherrer: kdiff3-0.9.95-os2ga.zip

If you are also interested in the Qt-port for OS2 and other ported applications, please see qt.netlabs.org, and svn.netlabs.org/qtapps.

2010-01-12: New package for Windows: KDiff3Setup_0.9.95-2.exe

Should fix the the explorer context menu extension on 64-bit systems.

2009-12-29: The integration into the explorer context menu doesn't yet work for 64-bit Windows.

Until I can fix this you might want to try Diff Ext by Sergey Zorin.

2009-03-25: Mac binary available for version 0.9.95 (created by Michael Schmidt)

2009-03-03: Version 0.9.95

• Show line end style for each file.
• Translation update.
• Bugfixes.

For the complete list of changes see the ChangeLog and the Release Message and MD5-sums.

2009-01-17: Version 0.9.94

Bugfix release. For the complete list of changes see the ChangeLog and the Release Message.

2009-01-06: Version 0.9.93

• KDE4 support (with much porting help from Valentin Rusu)
• Build process uses cmake (instead of auto-tools like autoconf, automake etc.)
• Dropped Qt3/KDE3 support (use 0.9.92 if you need this)
• Optional auto detection of line end style for saving.
• Option to close on ESC (default is off)
• Option to align B and C for 3 input files (default is off which is usually better for merging).
• Bugfixes.

For details see the Release Message.

2007-04-21: Newly compiled kdiff3-qt4.exe without dependencies in KDiff3Setup_0.9.92-2.exe.

2007-04-15: Version 0.9.92

• Windows: Simplified Clearcase integration via installer and config dialogs.
• KDE-Konqueror: Service menu plugin. (Use Konqueror to select files for comparison.)
• The windows installer now also contains a Qt4-based executable for testing. It's launchable from the Start-menu. This will become the default soon.
• Bugfixes.

2006-11-01: Version 0.9.91

• Encoding auto detection for Unicode files with byte order mark "BOM" at the file start.
• Diff-Ext-for-KDiff3 - shell extension for Windows included in installer (originally by Sergey Zorin: see also Diff Ext)
• Fix for slow startup problem on Windows (Patch by Manfred Koehler)
• Qt4-support: Much effort went into improving the KDiff3-Qt4-version and removing Qt3-support-dependencies but due to bugs in Qt4 it's still considered beta.
• Qt4-sources: Now also contained in the same source package, subdir src-QT4.
• Documentation and translations updated.
• Bugfixes.

2006-09-18: Very positive review of KDiff3 by Brian Burridge

2006-05-14: Version 0.9.90 is a bugfix release

• Fixed KIO-problems of type "File exists" with tempfiles.
• Fix for manual alignment with 3 files which caused crash.
• Preserve executable bit when overwriting an existing file.
• Documentation and translations updated.
• Extra source package with Qt4-support (beta). Can be built with Qt4-MinGW-package (GPL). Read the README for compilation support.

2006-04-09: Version 0.9.89 has a many big new features

• Version control history auto merge plus sorting
• Auto merge regular expression
• Splitting and joining differences for merging
• Manual Diff Alignment tool
• Printing of differences
• Colorsettings for Dir-Colors
• Dir-show identical/different/A-only/B-only/C-only files with immediate effect (instead of option "List only deltas")
• Filename-edit above DiffInputWindows
• Windows-Context Menu in A/B/C-columns for dir-comparison (Windows only)
• Edit Menu: Select All (Ctrl-A)
• New commandline options:
• --config filename: Select an individual config file. (Now also available for Windows and Qt-only version.)
• --cs config: Change one specific setting via the command line. (For settings that were previously adjustable via GUI only.)
• --confighelp: Show available config items and their current values.
• Dircomp: "Compare/Merge explicitly selected files" (Select files/dirs by clicking icons in columns A/B/C)
• User definable ignored command line options.
• Ability to swap pathnames in open dialog
• Bugfixes.
• Documentation and translations updated.

See also the more detailed announcement on the mailing list.

2005-11-20: Filemanager contextmenus

Very useful: Info about filemanager contextmenus.

2005-03-06: Binary for Max-OSX

Mark Teel provided a binary of KDiff3-0.9.88 for the Apple Mac-OSX for download. (Linked statically against Qt, which means that it should just work.)

2005-02-25: Version 0.9.88

• Bugfixes.
• Translations updated.

2005-01-30: Version 0.9.87 - Finally Unicode Support!

• Unicode16 and UTF8 support! (This was really tough. I hope you'll find it worth the long wait.)
• Directory "Full Analysis": Equality-Coloring for files with only whitespace differences. (Michael Denio)
• Support for right to left languages.

2004-06-14: Version 0.9.86 (Second version on same day!)

Bugfix

2004-06-14: Oops. Version 0.9.85 contains a very inconvenient regression. I'll fix it soon. Use 0.9.84 instead please.

2004-06-14: Version 0.9.85

Several Bugfixes

2004-05-31: Fixed Windows-DLL-dependency issue in KDiff3Setup_0.9.84-2.exe

2004-05-30: Version 0.9.84

New Features:

• Word Wrap for DiffTextWindow
• Directory-Comparison: Option "Full Analysis" allows to show the number of solved vs. unsolved conflicts or deltas vs. whitespace-changes in the directory tree.
• Should now also work on 64-bit systems.
• Docs now contain a new chapter for uses of preprocessor and line-matching-preprocessor.
• Added several credits which now are also visible in the Qt-only version.
• The Qt-only version now also shows all command-line options. Under windows a dialog shows them.
• Command line options -u and -L for Subversion-support.
• Command line options --L1/2/3 for specifying alias names.
• In the Qt-only-version the user-interface-language can be set via the regional-settings (only effective after a restart).
• Overview now allows to show the delta between two other files in triplediff-mode.
• Option to ignore case which treats case-changes like white space (instead of conversion to upcase).

Bugfixes

2004-03-06: Version 0.9.83

• Reading directorys fixed for Win95/98/ME
• Caseinsensitive filename matching for windows.
• Autocopy to selection for systems that support this. (Patch by Stefan Partheymueller)
• Windows: Start with invalid cmd-line-options brings up a messagebox with the list of options.
• Corrected encoding when copying to or pasting from clipboard.
• Warning when merging with preprocessor or upcase-conversion.
• Rewrite of preprocessing code should fix several problems. E.g.:
•     - Ignore C/C++-comments only worked with a preprocessor active.
•     - Preprocessor output now is input of line-matching preprocessor.
•     - Paste to diff-window, didn't work if LMPP or Ignore C/C++-Comments was set.
• New interface languages by the KDE-I18N-Team: fr, ta

2004-02-19: I'm very happy to say that this project received its very first donation. Yippieh! See Donations.

2004-02-18:

Mailinglist kdiff3-user for questions, support and discussions available now.

2004-02-02: Version 0.9.82

• DirectoryMerge: Running merge op for last item in a folder performed the merge op for all following items in following folders. (Possible data loss!)
• Icon for "Highlight white space differences."
• Editor-Option: Line End Style for saving: Dos/Windows "\r\n" vs. Unix "\n"
• Speedup for reading directories under Windows.
• New translations by the KDE-I18N-Team:
•    - New interface language: ru
•    - Documentation translations: da, et, it, sv

Bugfixes

2004-01-08: Version 0.9.81

First steps towards internationalisation. Translations for message strings by the KDE-I18N-Team. Languages: da, de, es, et, hu, it, pt_BR, pt, sr, sv

Bugfixes

2003-12-19: Abstract (pdf) added. Short information about what's special about KDiff3.

Older versions: (see Changelog in the package for details.)