Drag and drop any two folders to visualize the differences. Kaleidoscope isn't just for files - you can compare entire folders, too. "Zoom" and "Move" tools are also provided for any of these four views, making this a great tool for photographers and designers as well. With Kaleidoscope's "File Shelf" feature, you can open multiple images at the same time and quickly A/B any set of images you may need. "Difference View" is the preferred option to pinpoint very subtle differences, as it will offer a high contrast "difference mask" with opacity sliders that you can control. "Split View" will let you set a custom shape so that you can analyse an image in greater detail: Kaleidoscope's "Split View" What's new here is that you can also go for "Split View" or even "Difference View". Time to compare two images with Kaleidoscope! Just like in Tower, you can compare both images side by side ("Two Up View") or in isolation ("One Up View"). This can be a convincing argument for Marketing teams to adopt Git! Working with Word Documents Image Diff Kaleidoscope extracts and compares text from many document formats - stripping away all the formatting and leaving us with just plain text, perfect to spot any modifications quickly. We don't always work with source code - wouldn't it be nice to check the diffs on some Word and PDF documents? Thankfully, Kaleidoscope has got us covered! Text Diff in Kaleidoscope Working with PDF and Word Documents You can switch views by accessing the top right corner. It also provides three different layouts: Blocks, Fluid (my favorite!), and Unified. Kaleidoscope offers a great deal of detail and customization on how to visualize text diffs, such as showing/hiding line numbers, invisible characters or whitespace. Most developers will perform some kind of text comparison most of the time, so it makes sense to cover this first. Before we see how we can use it together with Tower, let's have a look at some of its nifty features. Kaleidoscope Git CLI integration Exploring Kaleidoscope's FeaturesĪs a standalone application, Kaleidoscope can already prove itseful quite useful. We just need to open Tower's Preferences and choose the "Git Config" tab. That way, we can quickly open any file with Kaleidoscope by right-clicking a file and selecting "Open Diff Tool for ", among other actions (more on that later). Let's switch gears for a brief second and also set Kaleidoscope as the default Diff and Merge tool in Tower. You can even use the Clipboard to import files! You will also notice that Kaleidoscope provides plenty of integration options - not only for macOS's system tools, such as Services, Shortcuts or the Share Extension, but also for Xcode, Safari, VSCode and even Alfred, to name a few. Simply head over to the "Git" section and click on both buttons: Kaleidoscope Git CLI integration Here, we recommend installing the ksdiff command-line tool (a requirement for other integrations to work, even if you don't plan to use the terminal) and making Kaleidoscope the default diff and merge tool. You can try it for free for 15 days, so anyone can follow along and try all these features free of charge.Īfter installation is complete, you'll be presented with an onboarding screen highlighting some of Kaleidoscope's advanced features and integration options. Kaleidoscope can be downloaded from the Mac App Store or directly from the official website. In this post, we'll focus on Kaleidoscope, the most popular tool out there for macOS (according to our recent Mac Dev survey) - that works seamlessly with Tower! Getting Started with Kaleidoscope 3 There are several free and paid Diff Tools available for the Mac. While this should be sufficient for some folks, you may need support for more file formats, like PDF or Word, the possibility of comparing entire directories side by side, or more customizable viewing options to comprehend what changed more conveniently. Tower, our Git client, is another good example: it can compare not only differences in text but also in images (it supports PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, JPEG2000, and HEIC). We've come a long way since then, of course, with multiple apps (such as code editors) offering good diffing support, either natively or via plug-ins. The original diff utility was developed in the early 1970s and shipped with the 5th Edition of Unix.
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