How Do I Use Beyond Compare: Introduction to Beyon
  • Forty things about Beyond Compare
  • Acknowledgements
  • Learn Beyond Compare in 5 Minutes
    • Quickstart: open two directories
    • Quickstart: open two files
    • Quickstart: move a file
    • Text Compare: understand the display
    • Downloads
  • Text Compare
    • How to use Beyond Compare for Text Compare
    • In Beyond Compare, what are unimportant differences?
    • Why no word-wrap ??
    • How to use Beyond Compare to confirm 100% replacement
    • Ignore Trivial Differences, Like Timestamps
  • Git
    • How to use Beyond Compare with Git
    • Do a roll-back to peek at your old code
    • Quickstart: Folder Merge
    • Why merge three folders?
    • Beyond Compare Three-Way Folder Merge Symbols Explained
    • How to compare two commits, both old, in Git
    • Git mergetool: merging three files.
    • How to recover an older version of your code with Git and Beyond Compare
    • Peeking under the hood at how Git does its thing
    • Getting better at Git
    • Find changes since last commit
    • Patches
    • How to configure Visual Studio to use Beyond Compare for Version Control
  • Scripts and the Command Line
    • How to use Beyond Compare in the Terminal
    • How to do an automatic backup every day
    • Write a Batch File That Will Start Several Syncs Simultaneously
    • Write a batch file that will start several text compares automatically
    • TL; DR
  • Table Compare
    • Quickstart: open a couple of Excel spreadsheets
    • Example: finding missing items in a pair of spreadsheets
    • Keys
    • Mismatched Columns
    • Longer example, opening .csv files
    • How to remove columns from a spreadsheet
    • Aligned vs Unaligned
    • Example: List of City Trees
  • Sync / Folders
    • Backup your entire computer (Part One)
    • Backup your entire computer (Part Two)
    • Backup, advanced
    • RegEx Examples: Filename Alignment Overide
    • Scan a lot or a little
  • Other
    • Peek
    • Binary
    • Undo
    • Colors
    • How to compare images
    • Report: Text Compare
    • Report: Table Compare
    • Looooonnnnngggg lines...
    • Binary: How to see the 1's and 0's
    • How to write your first script
    • How to find redundant or duplicate files
    • Minor Edge Cases
    • Shortcut Key
    • How to ignore parts of your file
    • Folder System Context Menus
    • About Evan Genest
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  1. Learn Beyond Compare in 5 Minutes

Quickstart: open two files

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Last updated 5 years ago

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For this exercise you can use your own file or download an file.

In Beyond Compare, start a new session from the pulldown menu: Session->NewSession->TextCompare. A pair of blank panels will appear. Now you need to get some directories open.

(1) Either click Beyond Compare's manilla-folder -buttons to browse for your files or

(2) you can drag in files with a mouse, or

(3) as shown below, use the context menu in your own filesystem. Open a window of your filesystem, rightclick, in the grey context menu, select Compare. You should see some files and folders open up:

Things to notice about your two text files once they open up: pink areas have major differences, blue areas are unimportant differences, such as blanks, spaces, or capitalization. If the files are computer code, things like code comments will show up as blue differences, while misspelled or refactored variable names will show up as red differences.

Also, look at the mailslot at the bottom of the screen. That is where you can zoom in to the character details of a single line. Try rightclicking it and playing around!

BC lacks word wrap, for technical reasons. The interface is giving you visual control over some powerful things and so far, Scooter has favored that power over the (seemingly simple) feature of wordwrap. Bottom line: it is not as simple to implement as it seems.

In the meantime, when lines are over 100 chars long, I

1) go to over under layout: view->display over under.

2) If that is not enough, I zoom out with the shortcut key: Ctl + Shift + Scrollwheel (exact key varies per Mac/Win/Linux).

3) Finally, I inspect really long lines in the bottom mailslot window.

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