display "percent difference"?

[krick]

I've started using beyond compare to diff large source trees. Sometimes, there are minor changes to a lot of files and I just want to look at the files with the most changes. It would be really convenient if there was a way to display and sort by "percent different" or something similar. Does something like this already exist?

[Chris]

Re: display \"percent difference\"?

There isn't a way to filter on percentage difference in files. If you set to view differences, it will show all files with differences.

If you have specific text differences you would like to ignore, it is possible to ignore them using file comparison rules. For details, see the Rules section of Beyond Compare's help file.

As an example, you can tell Beyond Compare to ignore all differences in text strings from FOO to BAR, or to ignore column ranges of text.

[krick]

Re: display \"percent difference\"?

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but I'm still wishing this feature existed. The source trees I'm looking at have thousands of files, and often the changes in each file are only one or two lines and there's no way to filter these sort of changes with rules.

I don't really need to have an exact percentage difference between each file, but a simple count of the number of differing lines would help. If I had the option to display this count in the middle column and was able to sort on it, it would be awesome.

Or, how about instead of the equals sign in the center column, give us the option to have three numbers...

XXX YYY ZZZ

XXX = number of total lines in left file
ZZZ = number of total lines in right file
YYY = number of differing lines

YYY would be 0 if the files were identical

Then the center column would be sortable by YYY.

[Chris]

Re: display \"percent difference\"?

Sorry, it still isn't possible to list a percentage difference in Beyond Compare.

To get a statistic on the number of different lines, you can use the File Differences Report command and select the "Statistics" layout.

[Guest]

Re: display \"percent difference\"?

Sorry, it still isn't possible to list a percentage difference in Beyond Compare.

Understood and noted. Percent Difference... not possible.

In lieu of that, what I'm asking for is instead of just a equal/not-equal in the center column, give us the option to show the number of differing lines in the center column and make that column sortable.

[Aaron]

Re: display \"percent difference\"?

I believe Chris was referring to the fact that it is still not currently possible (we haven't implemented it since the older/original post).

It is still on our wishlist of future enhancements. We are currently focusing our development resources on preparing the public beta of Beyond Compare 3.
http://www.scootersoftware.com/beta3/

[lifeh2o]

It has been 6 years since this thread started. A very simple measure like count of number of differences found will help a lot.

Just like we can see the number of differences as number of red lines when a file is opened.

[Aaron]

Displaying a count of the number of different lines is tracked when you open a pair of files in the BC3 Text Compare. It is displayed in the bottom status bar as "# difference sections". You can define a difference section to be grouped together or be one per line in the File Format definitions.

You can also generate a Summary report with the number of differences found.

Filtering files from a Folder Compare session based on a percent of differences found is still not supported.

[lifeh2o]

Yes I have noticed now that these stats are shown in status bar and the report as well.
But as originally stated in start of this thread, these stats should visible in column near equality mark. So that one can see just in a glance that which files are most and least different and should be opened for further work or not.

As you are already providing these stats, just having them in column for quick look should be possible now.

[Aaron]

The percent shown could be the number of lines or it could be the number of Difference sections, and we could need to clearly design and define this in the interface. There are likely other factors we would need to consider as well that we would only encounter during a detailed investigation.

It is on our wishlist when we are able to schedule it, but for now we are a small group and we are still working on other features and enhancements (like the Mac version), or bug fixes.

For a list of changes and fixes we have been able to implement since 2008, you can check out our change log, here:
http://www.scootersoftware.com/ChangeLog.txt

[sparkplug]

Is this still on the wishlist - or already possible?

[Chris]

Sorry, percentage difference is on the feature request list but not supported in the current version of Beyond Compare (4.2.9).

[sparkplug]

OK thanks. +1 for the feature request. It would be very useful for me.