Whilst I'm just smiling about the innumerable mistakes hard core posters here make - it's not by posting 11,000 posts of which 10,950 are just narcissistic rubbish that you accelerate "progress" in this world, and in general, "opinions" are worthless anywhere if not backed up by (valid) arguments, but go and explain this to 90 p.c. or more of this world's population, and my intervening in third partys' affairs would never ever be but for substantial fees -, I'm unable to leave behind loose ends of my own - it's rare that I'm entirely wrong, but even omissions of alternative aspects really torture me as if I had deliberately lied. Hence my urge to put some of these things into perspective.
As we have seen above, the "programmer" having asked me about hints for HOW to amend text comparing, presumably had just asked me to "prove" my alleged incompetence, by showing I had been asking for routines I would not be able to code myself; well the Germans have a verbal expression for that: Get up earlier for... nice try, anyway: I read this post, had you spontaneously participating in my thinking about it (I call this "public thinking", or "thinking in public" if you prefer), and within some 2 hours and a half, had come up with valid advice - no "thank you" whatsoever, albeit previous pretending to need such advice in order to design the adequate sw - I always said it, there is a blatant lack in sw designers today, even 30 (or is it 35?) years after the "invention" of the so-called pc, whilst coding is for anyone it seems, myriads of tools and full-grown applications lacking the strict minimum of sw design proving my assertion every day.
This being said, I would like to develop two aspects of BC and of compare tools in general.
I
First of all, Beyond Compare (BC) quite successfully hide their real strong feature, which is file-and-folder-compare. In fact, these last weeks, I had delved a little bit into their help file (always in version 3, cf. above), and from then on, I have extensively used their folder/file compare (ffc) routines.
I had always said it, here and elsewhere: Their ffc display is outstanding (and remember, I said I had trialled every synch tool up to about 200 bucks). One day, I spoke of their lack to develop BC into a grown-up synch tool, and even in their (kind) answer, the fact was left out that even BC-of-today/yesterday (v. 3) is as good as ANY dedicated synch tool out there, except for Syncovery (cf. my thread on that's behalf), and with BC having the superior display, far superior to anything else I've ever seen in that competition (and even far superior to Vice Versa's, which is a joy to use in its own respect).
a)
I really became interested in BC's ffc capabilities by needing a useful ftp tool; I construct my sites not by "Wordpress" as everyone else (incl. prof. developers, it seems) appears to do now, but within some 2-pane outliner, with heavy scripting (in AHK, of course, cf. my musings about that script tool on this site): Some coding within the outliner, then export to html, then an extensive script runs on the compound html file in order to create both the respective site content elements (which are necessarily different for every page of your site... and be it the bolded entries in otherwise identical trees/lists), and multiple simili-clones*, both of pages and of whole substructures/chapters.
* = Of interest here: Outliners which allow for "live clones" (e.g. Ultra Recall; MyInfo e.g. on the other hand does not update cloned parent items, which would exclude it from any such "automate cloning in my sites" idea anyway... and no, RightNote did not do anything about their ridiculous referring to thru items in their items' history...) surprisingly do not have a conceptual advantage here, since, in light of the above (= different site content elements for each individual page of that site), their "total (!) cloning paradigm" is counterproductive to say the least; in other words, your outliner supporting cloning or not, you will have to find other means in order to replicate both individual pages and entire substructures in other parts of your site(s).
Now I urgently invite you to read BC's help file's "Folder Compare" chapter thoroughly, and especially the page named "Folder Sync", and then try to use BC as an ftp tool: You'll be delighted to a degree that will you felicitate yourself to have bought BC in the first place*, even if you have discarded it as your text compare tool in the meantime (cf. my posts above): BC** is a first-rate ftp tool***, as you will quickly discover.
*= It's trial version's 30 days are non-consecutive, so you will have plenty of time before deciding about buying.
**= "BC" means "BC Prof" in my musings; never bothered about the standard version, so cannot say if / to what degree it will do the work, too
***= There are some dedicated ftp tools, but "reviews" out there being as bad as they are, I had not been able to decide which one(s) is/are able to synch between your local folder and your site-sided folder correctly, without trialling them one by one, which I did not do; on the other hand, the usual file managers are quite underwhelming, and if some of them both offers "folder synch" and "ftp", that not necessarily means that it offers them combined, too.
b)
Also, some other both quite hidden and in special cases tremendously (and what do I say: spectacularly!) useful ffc capabilities of BCC lies in the option "Ignore folder structure"; you will see similar functionality in X2's "flatten out subfolders" function (or whatever they call it), but here in BC you will have got it within a real synch environment, which will bring outstanding results, in special cases where no other means applies anymore. (Just imagine your backup image is faulty, and you try to save what it gets, or some chaos you will have created by working on files on two different devices at the same time...) In this context, don't overlook the right-click command(s) "Copy to..." (or "Move to...", of course).
Of course, for traditional synch jobs, an excellent tool like Syncovery arguably remains preferable, since it's able to
In summary, BC is a substandard text comparer, very unfortunately, but you will never regret your 50 bucks / soon 100 euro (incl. VAT) if you thoroughly use it for ffc and ftp.
II
As for differs detecting moved "lines", just some useful links (in disorder); as some almost-11,000-mostly-unuseful-poster said, you're expected to look them up by yourself, and to make up your mind on them without my guiding hand, or in other words, I'm too lazy to develop on them here and today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff-Texthttp://www.diff-text.com/ (online)
http://stackoverflow...d-multiple-revisionshttp://superuser.com...oved-lines-in-a-diffhttp://www.grigsoft.com/wincmp3.htmhttps://en.wikipedia...ki/User:Cacycle/diffhttp://www.scooterso...t-on-File-comparsion and
http://www.scooterso...b_externalconversion (just compare, this is outrageous, especially in the light of my post above, "lines" vs. blocks)
http://stackoverflow...oving-block-of-lineshttp://www.semanticd...ts/SmartDifferencer/ (very interesting approach, commercially, and otherwise quite revolting: they differenciate what I said above, for every possible coding language (I would not call them "programming languages" anymore, programming being the compound of sw design AND sw coding), and then sell the spliced-up sub-routines to their customers, instead of providing those alternatives by options/settings, even in combination, and especially, instead of doing some smart thinking about non-coding texts (of all kinds, btw: legal, textbook, or, even, why not, stage or screenplays, and let alone user-specific settings, independently of, and additionaly to, some such standard text TYPE "format"))
http://blog.bartdeme...merge-tested-on-svn/ and finally (April 4th, 1978!):
http://dl.acm.org/ci...m?doid=359460.359467 :
http://documents.scr...9oowpo1h81pgh1as.pdf : enjoy!
EDIT: I'm sorry I left out one important link from this list: Walter F. Tichy 1983 (!):
http://docs.lib.purd...7&context=cstechP.S. The intellectual level of this site really went down these last weeks; I very much hope my reading experience here will improve by remaining posters striving to amend their argumentation... and if they don't have got any, by their refraining from posting to begin with. Thank you so very much.
