Meld For Mac

Meld is a comparison and merging tool designed to help developers find differences between documents or folders, as well as projects that are version controlled.

The Meld app provides support for running two or three-way comparison sessions and also integrates merging capabilities.

When you launch the Meld application, you will be greeted by a new comparison window where you must select the type of task you want to perform: file or directory comparison, or version control view.

Note that you can open multiple comparison projects at the same time and Meld will keep them organized into tabs. What’s more, Meld adjusts the tools placed in the top toolbar depending on the type of comparison: you get to save document modifications, or merge the contents of directories.

The file comparison function is great to review code adjustments because Meld will highlight the lines that are different and create visual connections between the data. However, keep in mind that Meld might not render some file formats correctly.

Meld can scan the contents of different directories and let you know what items are included in both, but also the new or modified files. The app also enables you to apply different filters to the visualization: backups, OS-specific metadata, version control, binaries, or media.

You get to quickly jump through changes, choose to copy items between directories or delete files altogether. Worth mentioning is that Meld does not seem to send the deleted files to the Trash but removes them completely, so you will not be able to recover them after a wrong move.

Meld is able to work with various version controlled systems, such as Subversion, Bazaar, Git, or Mercurial. Naturally, you will need to have at least one of these systems installed on your system.

As a result, Meld will help you review the code, identify conflicts, and understand how the patches affect your projects.

To conclude, Meld can seriously improve the productivity of code developers by delivering simple tools that can help the user identify the differences between two projects and merge the content to avoid conflicts, in a time efficient manner.