Dear Francine,
I have only just discovered WinMerge. And all I can say is “wow!”.
I run a number of simple projects by myself and so we don’t use any sort of version control software. Generally latest and greatest rules.
However, on the odd occasion, I have had cause for maintaining two distinct versions of a site. The obvious drawback with this sort of manual version control management is the sustainability of migrating changes to more than about three files.
That’s when Slam informed me of WinMerge. Up to this point I was using WinDiff to track changes in my abstract scenarios. But when ol’ Slammy caught wind of my head grief he decided to tell all.
I am so enamoured with WinMerge now; I insist that all of you out there who are struggling with a good system for basic versioning and change-merging try this out. You can download WinMerge from SourceForge. It’s Open Source and free to use.
Whilst being simple and intuitive in it’s methods, it wields great power (like some sort of ninja I guess) giving an amazing amount of control over what files to compare, right down to the lines of code that you want to merge – and still allowing you to edit the source as you go!
Use it, love it, keep it close to you like a comfort toy.
