EditorEnhancement  //  Files Comparison

With the Files Comparison feature of EditorEnhancement you can find differences between two files directly in Developer Studio! No more need to use external utilities for files camparison!

To compare some file with another one, press the compare files button on the EditorEnhancement toolbar.

The "Select documents to compare" dialog box will be presented so that you may select both files. You may also define additional options of the comparison, inluding tiling direction and ignoring of leading spaces. The upper edit-box contains the name of the first file to compare. By default it is name of the current document. You can open any other file by pressing button . You should select the second file to compare in the list-box, which contains the list of all currently opened files. If desired file does not present in the list then you could press button and browse for a desired file.

When you select the second file its' name will be placed into the second edit-box and the OK button will be enabled.

When you press OK button, windows of the comparing files are placed side by side. The left window contains the first file and the right window contains the second file. All other opened windows are minimized. Non-matched lines in both files are marked as a bookmark, so you can navigate between them by pressing F2 to go to next line or SHIFT+F2 to go to the previous non-matched line.

You can switch between these windows by pressing TAB or SHIFT+TAB key. Active window has a text cursor, which you can move using standard methods, e.g. arrow and page keys, mouse and so on.

There is also a special blinking marker in the inactive window that marks the line corresponding to the current line in the active window. This marker is moving according to the position of the text cursor in the active window. the text in the inactive window is being automatically positioned in such a way that matched lines in both files are always at the same level.

You can edit text in the currently active window as usual - all editing operations are available. Also, if you add or delete line(s) in one file, then correspondence between matched lines of the files will be broken. To reestablish the correspondence, simply press the compare files button again. Files will be re-compared and correpsondence between matched lines will be refreshed.

There are several methods to cancel this mode and return to normal Developer Studio functioning: hit ESC key; close one of these two windows; switch to any other window.

The Files Comparison options setup allows you to specify its default settings or even completely disable this feature.