Text Comparer

Building applications is not a task for everyone, especially if you don’t exactly know any kind of programming language. If you’re already into it, various other tools apart from the IDE help out. For instance, specialized applications like Text Comparer can help you identify mismatches between two similar documents, and highlight differences.

The application comes in a lightweight package, and skips you the effort of going through a setup process, which means you can use it directly from a thumb drive. Above all, you need to make sure that Java Runtime Environment is installed on the computer you plan to use it on, because it was build on this platform and is a required component of functionality.

With the main window up, all that’s left to do is decide what files to compare, because there’s little to look at, except for the simple panes for the content of the target files. Drag and drop isn’t supported, so you need to use the built-in dialogs to load the source and destination files. Formats aren’t abundant either, and you’re only able to process TXT and RTF files.

The process doesn’t start right away, giving you a chance to set detection parameters first. Although a little ambiguous, numerical values can be configured for LD distance, words to skip, word length, search window, and result length, with an additional option to enable adaptive skips.

Putting the process in motion roughly takes a second to deliver results. All similar encounters are highlighted, leaving differences in plain text. However, you need to make sure that documents you load have text written on different lines, otherwise you’re in for a difficult time understanding anything.

Applications such as Text Comparer fit well into different domains of expertise, especially when working with a document which is constantly updated with small changes in content. This one aims to help out in identifying issues in code, but with the rough design, and poor file support, you’re better off taking a look yourself over content.