Features

• Comparing two files, three files, or two directories (shallow and recursive);
• Horizontal diffs highlighting;
• Files can be merged interactively and resulting output visualized and saved;
• Has features to assist in performing merge reviews/policing;
• Can unmerge CVS conflicts in automatically merged file and display them as two files, to help resolve conflicts;
• Uses external diff program to compute differences: works with GNU diff, SGI diff and ClearCase's cleardiff, and any other diff whose output is similar to those;
• Fully customizable with a resource file;
• Look-and-feel similar to Rudy Wortel's/SGI xdiff, it is desktop agnostic (i.e. will work equally well with KDE or Gnome);
• Features and output that ease integration with scripts.

xxdiff was (and probably still is) tested daily in a merge reviewing/policing context by more than 50 engineers at discreet, and since this task is a significant part of their development process, many of the features are a direct result of suggestions from these people while the author was working there.

New releases and updates are announced on freshmeat. You can register for notification at either freshmeat or sourceforge. xxdiff is implemented in C++ and its runtime dependencies is only the Qt UI toolkit from TrollTech.

Screenshots

• Screenshots

Tools

xxdiff comes with a bunch of wrapper Python scripts that invoke xxdiff in creative ways. The author has been using these for a long time now and decided for version 3.0 to clean them up and make them a little more generic so everyone can use them.

• xxdiff-conf-replace: conditional to a user's acceptance (or merge decision), replace an original file by a new file (typically the result of some external process). This is useful in shell loops, a general purpose interactive conditional copy operation;

• xxdiff-find-grep-sed: walk a directory hierarchy, and perform a conditional sed replacement on a given pattern, accepting, rejecting or merging each change graphically;

• xxdiff-encrypted: compare contents of encrypted files and merged into encrypted file. This script takes care of decrypting the input files and encrypting the merged output file with gpg.

• xxdiff-match: run xxdiff on a arbitrary set of files, matching pairs or triples of files by basename. This effectively allows you to do something like this:

  xxdiff-match srcold/*.c srcnew/*.c
  

• xxdiff-patch (UNFINISHED): preview and accept/reject a patch to a set of files. This script is unfinished because we have not been dealing with file additions and deletions, feel free to chip in;

• xxdiff-cvs-diff: preview CVS changes and if desired accept/reject changes to commit individually;

Working versions and help files for scripts that support configuration management systems can be found in the distribution under the tools/ directory (CVS, ClearCase, etc.).

Packages

Packages are available for some specific operating systems. Here are links to the relevant pages. The author does not publish binaries anymore.

• Linux / Debian package (provided by Tomas Pospisek)
• Linux / Mandrake package (maintained by Oded Arbel)
• Linux / Gentoo port (in the dev-utils category)
• OpenBSD / ports tree (maintained by Dan Weeks, available in the ports tree)
• IRIX / Tardist package (provided by the SGI freeware team (version may be lagging behind))

Dependencies

Build dependencies are:

• Qt-3.2 or higher
• tmake
• a C++ compiler, flex and yacc

Runtime dependencies are:

• Qt-3.2 or higher

Portability

xxdiff is known to build and work on a great majority of UNIX platforms where Qt works. It has also been ported it to Mac OSX.