Text Comparator

To identify differences in text, you can use a specialized application like Text Comparator, which displays two panes side by side for each text source and checks the text for matches automatically. It's a lightweight software utility for Windows which doesn't require installation.

The interface of this tool is plain and simple. Two panes are shown side by side, where you can paste text from any two sources. The text comparison job is performed in real time, so the slightest modification affects the result. If the two texts are identical, you will see "Match" in green (otherwise, "Un-Match" in red).

If you click the "Un-Match" button, this brings up a new window with statistics related to the differences between the two texts, including the string positions and Unicode characters. All strings of characters are taken into account when comparing text, and this includes blanks (spacebar and tabs), Carriage Return (CR), Line Feed (LR) and CRLF. Case sensitivity is enabled by default but you can disable this. The ASCII characters are not shown in the stats.

If you take another look at the main window with the side-by-side texts, you can notice that some parts of text in both panes are highlighted automatically. This is meant to draw your attention toward the matching strings, in order to spot duplicates easier.

The highlights stop when the first difference is encountered by the application. However, this means that any matching text after the first difference is not taken into account for the highlights. It would've been a bit easier for users to have a bit of configuration control over this aspect, such as setting the auto highlights for text differences instead of matches. Also, word wrapping isn't supported.

You can unzip the downloaded package and just double-click the .exe to reach the app window. Since setup is not necessary and there are no software prerequisites involved (such as .NET Framework), it's possible to store Text Comparator on a USB flash drive to directly run the program on any PC. The tool doesn't need Internet access so you can use it while working on text-based projects even when you're offline.

We haven't experienced any compatibility issues with Windows 10 in our tests. Text Comparator is easy to use, fast, small-sized and doesn't require setup. However, it comes packed with a simplistic set of features that doesn't help it stand out in the crowd. We're looking forward to more options and configuration settings in future releases.