No developer likes to merge their code in with other code after finishing a big project. Its a royal pain in the ass. I find myself having to do it at work a lot (we have a largish team) and at home because at home, I somehow find that I have 84 copies of the same thing. So, I need to merge them together occasionally to keep things maintainable.

Merging is by far 10 times easier on Linux than windows. Linux is such a good development environment (apart for .net – but then, who uses .net anyway?). I would recommend getting VirtualBox, Fedora (or Ubuntu) and installing them on a windows machine. Even if you only use it for coding, profiling and merging / deploying. Its worth it and takes bugger all time to set up.

I am using Ubuntu on my VirtualBox. I prefer Fedora, but I found it hard to get higher resolutions with it. Anyway, I’m off topic.

Once you create your two directories or files that you need to merge or create a diff for. You can open one of the three programs;

My personal favourite is Meld. There are others out there. If you use something else, let me know about it.

Using one of these apps takes the hard work out of merging. In meld, you can match custom rules (for example, you can match all files in the ‘cache’ directory) and then ignore them.

Then, once your files / directories are merged, you can use something like KDESvn to commit them (if you are not savvy enough with the command line SVN client).

All done. Merged, Committed and time for a beer.

If you are unlucky to be on a Windows machine. No real biggy, but your choice of free clients becomes slim.

TortoiseSVN is the app of choice for interacting with an SVN repo.

Once you have the directories, you can merge them with WinMerge. I do find this app a little lacking. It doesn’t display the files in a heirarchical view, so diffing 10,000 files (which I did yesterday) just lists them all one by one and not within their directories.

I have heard a lot of good things about Beyond Compare but it is not free.

Let me know what you use for comparing, diffing and merging files.

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