How to Find & Compare File Differences Side-By-Side with BBEdit for Mac

How to Find & Compare File Differences Side-By-Side with BBEdit for Mac

Need to compare two files side-by-side for differences? BBEdit for Mac makes finding and identifying file differences extremely easy with any compatible text format. This is a great solution for developers, programmers, writers, or anyone else who works with code, scripts, or plain text documents frequently and wants an easy way to check for differences in two text files while staying in the familiar GUI. As already mentioned, well be using BBEdit for this purpose. BBEdit is a fantastic text editor for Mac that is free to download and use with a slightly limited feature-set though its still more feature rich than TextWrangler and $50 to gain the entire apps feature suite. For our purposes here of finding and comparing differences in two files, the free version of BBEdit will get the job done. BBEdit is a Mac classic that has been around since long before Mac OS X even existed, and its one of the most powerful, fastest, and feature rich text editors you can get for the Mac. * Note you can also drag and drop text files into the Find Differences window if youd prefer to place files into BBEdit to compare that way. You can compare differences in any compatible text files side-by-side with BBEdit using this approach. If you dont want to use BBEdit for whatever reason, perhaps because youre unable to download or install an app onto the Mac, you can as well, or , or if you use git than git diff FileName.txt works as well. Those options work best with code, scripts, and plain text, however, and if youre looking to compare copies of rich text formatted items created in Pages or Microsoft Office than youd likely want to , which works with any .doc or .docx file (and recall that you can beforehand). Do you know of another approach to find differences in text files and compare them? Share in the comments below!