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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  • The encoding setting
  • File Formats

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  1. Learn Beyond Compare in 5 Minutes

Text Compare: understand the display

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Last updated 6 years ago

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From the pulldown menu choose Session->NewSession->TextCompare Load the left and right panels by dragging files with the mouse and dropping them anywhere. You can drag in Python code, two images, some Word docs, a couple of PDFs... Or use this .

Here is our Text Compare session. Four parts of the display are numbered in this screenshot:

  1. This white slot is a pulldown menu that shows a list of recently opened files.

  2. This button lets you browse your file system

  3. This is the save button. If you edited your file you can save it. Editing is not possible for MS Word, MS Excel, or PDF. Editing is possible for most other filetypes. (My favorite thing to play with is editing a hex file and then saving it.)

  4. This skinny part along the left margin is a thumbnail of your whole document. You can rightclick it to change its size. That is important if your document is so long that the pixels compress and distort their meaning.

The encoding setting

5. There's a dropdown in the panel: UTF-8, UTF-16, ANSI. 90% of the time you don't need to touch this setting. BC picks it up from a short tag at the start of a normal text file. Here's what that small gray button does: the top panel is how the text was meant to look. The bottom panel shows the same file displayed when the wrong encoding (UTF-16) is accidentally selected from the dropdown.

File Formats

Because the name of this file ends in a C extension, Beyond Compare can apply the grammar rules of that language (6). In this screenshot, the C comments are recognized as unimportant differences and get highlighted in blue. You can manually configure these detectable formats from the menu: Tools->FileFormats. Also visible in this shot is (7), the line ending style. If you are not a programmer, don't worry too much about this. Just know that the possible lineendings are Unix, PC, Mac, or Mix.

If you are curious to see the hidden text-encoding character, also called the , at the start of a plaintext file, here are two files. Both say foo, one starts with the bytes that proclaim encoded in UTF8 and the other starts with the code that proclaims Unicode.

You can manually tweak the File Format at (6). Here I have set it deliberately to the naive setting, Everything. No grammar is applied. We see that whitespace still shows up blue (unimportant) but C language comments are red (important). Look at your own pulldown menu at (6). Then look at your menu: Tools->FileFormats And finally, head to the Scooter Software page and see the you can download for free.

BOM
supplemental file formats
test data
Viewing two text files in a Beyond Compare Hex Code Session