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.

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. As of version 3.2, the standalone scripts have been refactored a great deal, to share code together and to make them more stable. All this code is now distributed with xxdiff, in an xxdiff Python package, which you can leverage to build your own file transformation scripts around xxdiff.

See the document Helper Scripts for xxdiff for full details.

The scripts are available in the xxdiff distribution. To install them and the accompanying Python package, use the standard distutils procedure:

su -  # before root
cd xxdiff-3.x
python setup.py install

Other tools 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 (1) (maintained by Oded Arbel)
• Linux / Mandrake package (2) (maintained by Roberto A. Foglietta)
• Linux / Fedore Core (1) (maintained by Marcin Zajączkowski)
• 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-4.5 or higher
• a C++ compiler, flex and yacc

Runtime dependencies are:

• Qt-4.5 or higher

Portability

xxdiff is known to build and work on a great majority of UNIX platforms where Qt works, including Mac OS X.