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Viorel PETCU
Viorel PETCU

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Meld alternative for MacOS

But Why?

I recently "had to" switch from PC to a Mac because of the lack of support from Microsoft for their collaboration software, I mean Office 365, Skype for Business and of course Microsoft Teams.

Now, while there are some "hacky" ways to workaround these "limitations" when having a daily driver that is a PC running Linux, the company policies do not allow for such things.

That is why I opted to replace my beloved PC with a Mac, I figured that the Unix DNA of Mac OS would ensure that enough of my Linux workflow would be able to survive the transition.

πŸ˜₯ Sigh πŸ˜₯

What now ?

It's not that bad, I was able to reach my primary goal: run the required apps from Microsoft native and take advantage of the Mac Book Pros hardware, but I am now faced with a new problem: I have to find replacements for the software I got accustomed to on my Linux OS and environment.

The first, I think, good solution I found was a replacement for the awesome tool that is MELD because at the time of writing this, the Mac OS port is not yet finished and building from source is not something I want to do as a noob

Snapshot from meldmerge.org

So I am going to use the Community Edition of the IntelliJ IDE, it provides a lot of stuff I use daily, and am glad it offers a great diff tool that can handle files and folders.

Why I like it.

The coolest feature that Jet Brains builds into all its products is the OMNI-search or Global Search, this makes it easy to find stuff that is indexed and then select the candidates I want to compare:

tap SHIFT twice
type the filename
select file 1
repeat and select file 2
hit ⌘ + D once you have them

CTRL-D or CMD-D

What else ?

Of course It is much more useful than just for melding stuff, here are the other things it brings out of the box (and also what it doesn't):

Feature Community Edition
License Open-source, Apache 2.0
Java, Kotlin, Groovy, Scala βœ”
Android βœ”
Maven, Gradle, SBT βœ”
Git, SVN, Mercurial βœ”
Perforce ✘
JavaScript, TypeScript ✘
Java EE, Spring, Play, Grails, Others ... ✘
Database Tools, SQL ✘
Detecting Duplicates ✘

But this does not mean it is limited to these, the plugin system that powers the IDE is a treasure trove of useful stuff you can explore, stuff like:

markdown navigator

python support

. . .

git toolbox

Conclusion

This is a workaround I will, at some point, build MELD and add it to my toolbox. While I can get away with diff and diff3 on the terminal, I do like the assistance that I get in merging when using a GUI, and IntelliJ is simply not intended to be used as a command line tool.

Take care and compare,

Vio.

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