> > If that is true then TFC is unusable. If *changes* in lines are
> not
> > considered (only insertion/deletion) then you can't use it for a
> general
> > comparison of text files.
>
> My son pointed me to KDiff3 (http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net) which is a
> bit slower but correct (and has lots of additional options and is also
> free).
Jürgen,
Two points:
Firstly the section on insertions is a discussion of re-syncing. If there are only line changes re-syncing is unnecessary, the line counters in both files are already in sync. It is *not* a discussion of what TFC counts as a difference, and it certainly does count changed lines as a difference.
Secondly, the [D]iff chars option in TFC allows you to choose whether differing characters are highlighted or not. For me that has always worked perfectly (though I have not often tried to compare text files that are 100s of Kilobytes long).
I don't think it is fair to compare TFC with KDiff. KDiff is over 12MB large, is a graphical program. TFC is a small console program (under 60KB) which integrates nicely with ZTree. I think Ian deserves our thanks for maintaining it.
Oliver