Diff Settings

The Diff page in the Preferences dialog displays the Diff, Format, Options and Exclude tabbed forms. These forms can be used to configure the behavioral properties of the Diff program.

Diff

Kompare Diff Settings

The command used to run the diff program (default diff).

Format

Kompare Format Settings

Adjust options for the Output Format and number of Lines of Context.

Output Format

Context

The context output format adds several lines of context around the lines that differ.

Normal

The normal output format displays differing lines without any surrounding lines of context.

Unified

The unified output format is a variation on the context format. It is considered better than context because the output is more compact than that of context as it omits redundant context lines.

Lines of Context

Number of context lines

When performing a diff with context or unified output format use this parameter to control the number of context lines included.

Options

Kompare Options Settings

The Options tab form allows configuration of the options supported by the diff program.

General

Treat new files as empty

With this option enabled diff will treat a file that only exists in one of the directories as empty in the other directory. This means that the file is compared with an empty file and because of this will appear as one big insertion or deletion.

Look for smaller changes

Forces diff to display changes in case, punctuation, space, etc. when checked.

Optimize for large files

Switches diff to process files with high-speed when checked.

Ignore changes in case

Lower and Uppercase character changes are omitted when this option is checked.

Ignore regexp

Ignore lines matching a regular expression.

Whitespace

Expand tabs to spaces in output

When checked diff outputs will converts tab characters to the number of spaces defined in the Preferences dialog View menu Tabs to Spaces option.

Ignore added or removed empty lines

lines of zero length that differ between source and destination are ignored when this option is checked.

Ignore changes in the amount of whitespace

White space before, after and between lines may change depending on different editors. When this option is checked such changes are ignored.

Ignore all whitespace

when checked white space differences are completely ignored.

Ignore changes due to tab expansion

when checked white space resulting from tab characters is ignored.

Exclude

The Exclude form enables use of the filter options provided by the diff program.

Kompare Exclude Settings

File Pattern to Exclude

File Pattern to Exclude

Exclude files based on wild card filtering

File with Filenames to Exclude

File with Filenames to Exclude

Define the filter based on the content of an externally managed file.