Comparing Text Files

Comparing files is easy—open a file comparison window and load the files, or paste the texts, you want to compare.

Opening a new file comparison window

Menu File > Compare Files
Toolbar button Compare New Files image
Keyboard Shortcut Ctrl+Shift+F

Opening files

File Selector:

File selector

  • Type file path; auto-suggest and auto-complete will make this easier
  • Click button to bring up Select File dialog
  • Select from history (dropdown list)
Keyboard Shortcut Ctrl+O (when file comparison window has the input focus)
Drag and Drop Drag a file from the file-system browser and drop it onto one of the path entry/browse widgets or onto one of the text editors.

Pasting text

Menu Edit > Paste
Toolbar button Paste button image
Keyboard Shortcut Ctrl+V

DeltaWalker initiates the actual comparison as soon as a file is loaded, or text is pasted, into a text editor. As a result you'd get a window that looks something like this (actual editor content will be different):

File Comparison Window image

Navigating differences

Once you have content in your comparison window's editors you'd most likely want to:

DeltaWalker provides the following ways for difference navigation:

Menu File > Navigate > Next/Previous Difference
Toolbar button Next Difference image / Previous Difference image
Keyboard Shortcut Ctrl+Shift+Down Arrow / Ctrl+Shift+Up Arrow
Mouse Ctrl+Mouse Wheel
Other Difference navigation mini-buttons Next Difference Small image / Previous Difference Small image at the bottom of the common scrollbar

Comparing Office and PDF documents

DeltaWalker is capable of extracting the text content of Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org and PDF documents. When loading such files, either via drag and drop or using the file selectors, DeltaWalker will strip away their formatting and work only with their text contents. Almost always this is the type of comparison one expect to see when comparing documents.

DeltaWalker can extract text from the document/application formats:

When comparing Office documents it is often desirable to break long paragraphs at word boundaries to avoid horizontal scrolling. You can control this functionality from Preferences > File Comparison > Editing page.

Please note that text from Word document tables is not extracted. Once extracted, the text cannot be saved back into its original file, however you can easily save it as plain text.

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