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I have several config files in my .net applications which I would like to merge application settings elements etc. I was about to begin doing it manually as I usually do, however thought there must be an XML diff GUI tool available somewhere. The tool would be able to go to the element level to compare and display the differences etc. However Google gave no substantive free tool results and no hints for anything of value. Is such a tool available? That is very useful? For free? Thanks in advance. :) Edit: Here is a bit of clarification of the functionality that would turn my error-prone,

I need an algorithm that can compare two text files and highlight their difference and ( even better!) can compute their difference in a meaningful way (like two similar files should have a similarity score higher than two dissimilar files, with the word "similar" defined in the normal terms). It sounds easy to implement, but it's not. The implementation can be in c# or python. Thanks. In Python, there is difflib , as also others have suggested. difflib offers the SequenceMatcher class, which can be used to give you a similarity ratio. Example function: def text_compare(text1, text2, isjunk

Is it possible to ask git diff to include untracked files in its diff output? Or is my best bet to git add the new files I've created and the existing files I have edited, and use git diff --cached ? araqnid With recent git versions you can git add -N the file (or --intent-to-add ), which adds a zero-length blob to the index at that location. The upshot is that your "untracked" file now becomes a modification to add all the content to this zero-length file, and that shows up in the "git diff" output. git diff echo "this is a new file" > new.txt git diff git add -N new.txt git diff diff --git a

Is there a way to use Winmerge inside of git to do Diffs? VonC Update June 2015, 6 years later: As detailed in " git mergetool winmerge ", a simple git config diff.tool winmerge will be enough. Git 2.5+ (Q2, 2015) is now aware of Winmerge as a diff or merge tool! Original answer (2009-2012) (msysgit, 1.6.5, DOS session) The first part (using winmerge) is described in " How do I view ‘git diff’ output with visual diff program? " C:\myGitRepo>git config --replace --global diff.tool winmerge C:\myGitRepo>git config --replace --global difftool.winmerge.cmd "winmerge.sh \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\"" C: