{"id":239685,"date":"2022-10-04T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2022-10-04T15:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/?p=239685"},"modified":"2022-10-04T08:14:15","modified_gmt":"2022-10-04T15:14:15","slug":"comparing-files-in-visual-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/visualstudio\/comparing-files-in-visual-studio\/","title":{"rendered":"Comparing files in Visual Studio"},"content":{"rendered":"

As developers, we often need to compare two files to find the differences. Sometimes, even comparing the content of the clipboard with a file on disk. And again, sometimes comparing our local changes to previous versions from our Git commit history. There is no straightforward way in Visual Studio to do those things today, but in this month\u2019s experiment we\u2019re going to change that.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

Various editors and IDEs offer this feature today, but Visual Studio has required the use of extensions such as VS Diff<\/a> to provide the feature. An interesting thing about the various implementations is that they offer slightly different features and with different UI paradigms. They all perform basic comparison between files rather well, and we think it\u2019s time we figured out how to design this feature for Visual Studio.<\/p>\n

A feature request<\/a> on the Visual Studio Developer Community is also now gaining steam asking for file comparison, so please vote and comment<\/a> if you agree.<\/p>\n

So, with increased interest and multiple viable solutions, what would the right implementation look like for Visual Studio users?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s do an experiment to find out.<\/p>\n

The experiment<\/h2>\n

We\u2019re starting out with an extension to kick off the experiment. We call it File Differ<\/a> and the first iteration adds basic file diffing capabilities.<\/p>\n

Solution Explorer<\/h2>\n

Here\u2019s are the commands available from the right-click menu in Solution Explorer:<\/p>\n