It seems I have gained a reputation amongst my peers to be a diff tool hopper. That is, I am on a quest to find the perfect diff tool for my development. I think I have given just about every free tool out there a good run for it’s money and tend to move to the next one when I find myself in a situation that the current tool cannot cope with.
After exhausting all the free options, I made the shift to the commercial tool Beyond Compare 3 a few weeks ago and have not looked back since. So far, it has been awesome. Slick, easy to understand the differences and the pro version even does the three way merging needed for git.
I spend most of my development time, be it C#, VB, PHP or Javascript in the visual studio environment and so when I use git for source control, git extensions is essential. Making both git extensions and Beyond Compare work together is a little bit of trail and error as the very informative source control support page only covers configuring git via the bash. So to save myself the brain ache again and perhaps to help others, I jot these settings down:
Under Global Settings:
Merge tool: BCompare
Path to mergetool: C:/Path/To/BComp.exe
Mergetool command: “C:/Path/To/BComp.exe” “$LOCAL” “$REMOTE” “$BASE” “$MERGED”
Diff tool: BCompare
Path to difftool: C:/Path/To/BComp.exe
Difftool command: “C:/Path/To/BComp.exe” “$LOCAL” “$REMOTE”
Make sure you dont override the tool in the local settings or if you want to set it to BCompare.
Hey – thanks for sharing
Hey, thanks a lot. They have integrated BCompare3 in last version of GitExtensions (v2.22) but the suggested command for 3-way merge was incorrect. Thanks a lot for sharing !
Yep. Too bad. 🙂
@urig No idea I’m afraid but I would be surprised if that is possible. That diff looks well integrated.
Thanks for sharing this knowledge. It’s very helpful.
Might you know if there’s any way to get Beyond Compare to replace Git Extensions’ “internal” diff view? Like in the diff tab below the commit list?
Thanks for finding out 🙂
They have configuration settings for many applications on the BC3 website, but Git Extensions is not one of them – but hey: We have google 😀
been using BC3 for about a month now. great tool!
You can see the differences here. For me the killer pro feature was 3 way merge (needed for git) but if I didn’t need that I probably wouldnt bother with pro. The trial allows you to checkout the pro features beforehand so perhaps use the trial for a bit and see if you need pro.
Are you using pro or standard? Just wondering if standard is worth using or if it is only worth moving if going pro.