I want to have an overview of the changes between two different branches of our project. Most of the diff tools (winmerge etc) provide a side-by-side listing of both dirs recussively, where you can see if the file is changed, missing in one side or equal, like this:
What I seeking is to have the same view, but adding a value that says ‘how much has changed‘ in each file (and being able to order by it for example). Does somebody know of any tool that would provide something like that? I am interested in seeing that for example 10 files have heavily changed while hundreds maybe just have small cosmetic changes etc.
If there is none, then maybe it could be written, but first ‘how much has changed’ should have to be defined, does that concept already exist? Otherwise, what would you choose as a way to measure it:
- levenshtein distance of the text in both files (that would be easy to code)
- number and size of changes detected by the same algo diff tools use
- any other?
Of course, some files might have been renamed…one might just ignore those for starters, or if given access to a repository that handles renames (Hg or git) probably it is possible to find what files were renamed between the two branches and compare them as the rest.
I have seen this question but I am not looking for something that just works in a given language.
AraxisMerge provides the number of differences in each file and yes, you can sort by that column:
Although it’s not free, it’s the best Diff/Merge tool I’ve ever seen. Using it in my daily work and would recommend it to everyone.