ASCIIDiff Text File Comparison Utility

Source code text can be difficult to analyze since a great deal of attention is required. What’s more, bug hunting might also imply comparing the new code with the original one, but there are tools to help out in this regard. ASCIIDiff Text File Comparison Utility is a suitable example, with neatly displayed differences for easy identification.

The application comes in a lightweight package which doesn’t even require installation in order to function. This means it can be directly deployed on a thumb drive in case you need to use it on other computers besides your own. You don’t need to worry about the health status of the target PC, because registry entries remain intact during the whole operation.

Needless to say that you need at least two files to work with the application. You can simply drop them over the dedicated input fields, or use the browse dialogs. Before checking for differences, there’s the possibility to set some general rules, like ignoring tailing or leading whitespaces, disregard character casing, whether to show all matched lines, and add custom strings to look for.

The result of the process is brought up in a different window. Each file is loaded in a separate pane, with color highlights for differences, and similar lines to make identification easy. By default, the results window is set to read-only mode, so you don’t accidentally modify content, but this is changed at the press of a button.

You can choose to save differences to file, as well as entire files with new content. Processing large files also benefits from search tools which can be started on both, or individual files. Moreover, there’s the possibility to merge content in different ways, and export result so that original files are not affected.

All things considered, ASCIIDiff Text File Comparison Utility helps identify differences in text files of several types, and is mostly useful for comparing two source files. Editing can be done on the spot either to fix, or merge files together, while portability allows it to be used on other computers without installation.