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. Text Compare

In Beyond Compare, what are unimportant differences?

PreviousHow to use Beyond Compare for Text CompareNextWhy no word-wrap ??

Last updated 6 years ago

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Beyond Compare will mark some parts blue. Beyond Compare is trying to tell you "these are different, technically, but you probably won't care".

Uppercase and lowercase are considered unimportant differences.

The real information about what is different between File A and File B is in the color of the letters. Letters change color to show file differences. The yellow letters are different in the files above, the beige letters are the same. (Note about .)

Background gives a summary of the entire line. Red: something is REALLY different. Blue: the differences are minor. Beige: nothing is different; every single byte is the same.

To turn off display of unimportant differences, press the button. The blue will disappear:

If you like these bold colors, you should notice that they look different than yours. In BC you can easily . But be warned, until you understand BC and what it is trying to show, you should stick to curated palettes.

customize your colors
my color settings
Blue: trivial difference Red: major difference Beige: same (Notice the letter colors.)
The same two files but the Minor key tells BC to not color differences that are unimportant