Beyond Compare – It really Is…

Back in the day, I was a big fan of SlickEdit and have bemoaned the fact that it was not available on OS X.

One of its great features was the file and directory compare facility. Until last year or so, I thought it was the best.

Colleagues raved about this Windows app called Beyond Compare and how good it was. Windows only, so I didn’t pay much attention. Then there was a beta for OS X and I tried it out.

And boy does it rock.

  • Comparing directories or files, no problem at all.
  • Comparing log files and getting it to ignore differences such as log times.
  • Comparing zip, jar or war files to find differences without having to first unpack them.
  • Comparing tar files that have been gzipped and have different checksum due to gzip timestamp.

It has stopped my pining for SlickEdit.