Compare Side by Side in Sublime Text: A Developer’s Essential Tool

For developers and programmers, comparing code and text files is a routine yet crucial task. The ability to Compare Side By Side different versions of code, configuration files, or even plain text documents can significantly enhance productivity and accuracy. Sublime Text, a popular code editor known for its speed and extensibility, offers a powerful package to streamline this process: Compare Side-By-Side. This tool brings efficient and intuitive side-by-side comparison directly into your Sublime Text environment.

Key Features for Efficient Comparison

Compare Side-By-Side is packed with features designed to make your comparison tasks seamless and effective:

• Effortless Selection: Easily choose two files or specific text selections for comparison. Whether you’re working with tabs or highlighted portions within a file, initiating a comparison is quick and intuitive.
• Dedicated Comparison Window: Results are displayed in a new window, keeping your main workspace clean and focused. This dedicated view ensures you can concentrate solely on the differences between your files.
• Intelligent Line Alignment: The tool intelligently adds empty lines to ensure that lines of common code are perfectly aligned for easy visual scanning. This feature is invaluable for quickly grasping the overall structure of changes.
• Change Summary: Get a quick overview with a count of the number of lines that have been changed between the compared files. This provides an immediate quantitative measure of the modifications.
• Visual Highlighting: Changed lines are highlighted using standard diff colors, making it instantly clear where modifications have been made. This visual cue dramatically speeds up the identification of differences.
• Intra-line Diff Highlighting: Go beyond line-level changes. This feature highlights the specific characters or words that have been altered within a line, offering a granular view of modifications.
• Synchronized Scrolling: Navigate through compared files effortlessly with synchronized scrolling. As you scroll in one view, the other view mirrors the movement, ensuring you always see corresponding sections side by side.

Installation is a Breeze

Adding Compare Side-By-Side to your Sublime Text is straightforward, thanks to Sublime Text’s Package Control:

1. Open Package Control: Press Ctrl+Shift+P (or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS) to open the command palette.
2. Install Package: Type “Install Package” and select it from the dropdown menu.
3. Search for Compare Side-By-Side: In the Package Control search bar, type “Compare Side-By-Side” and select it to install.

Alternatively, for manual installation:

1. Browse Packages: Open Sublime Text and navigate to Preferences -> Browse Packages.
2. Clone or Extract: Clone the package repository from GitHub into a new folder within your ‘Packages’ directory, or extract the downloaded zip file into a new folder there.

Usage Options to Suit Your Workflow

Compare Side-By-Side offers multiple ways to initiate comparisons, catering to different user preferences and scenarios:

• Tab Context Menu: Right-click on a tab and select “Compare with…” to choose another tab for comparison.
• View Context Menu: Right-click within the active view and select “Compare with…” to compare with another open tab.
• Compare with Active Tab: Right-click on a tab and select “Compare with active tab” for a quick comparison against the currently active file.
• Selection-Based Comparison:
  1. Highlight text in a file.
  2. Right-click and choose “Mark selection for comparison”.
  3. Highlight text in another file or the same file.
  4. Right-click and choose “Compare selections”.
• Multiple Selections Comparison: Create two selections by holding CTRL (or Cmd on macOS) while selecting text in the same file, then choose “Compare selections”.
• Command Line Interface: For advanced users, command-line options are available. Refer to the README_COMMANDS.md file in the package repository for details.
• Navigation Shortcuts: Quickly jump between changes using keyboard shortcuts: Alt+N for next change and Alt+P for previous change.

Configuration and Customization

Tailor the appearance of your comparisons through Sublime Text’s color scheme settings. Compare Side-By-Side utilizes standard diff scopes, allowing you to customize the highlighting colors:

• diff.inserted.sbs-compare
• diff.inserted.char.sbs-compare
• diff.deleted.sbs-compare
• diff.deleted.char.sbs-compare

To adjust these colors:

1. Customize Color Scheme: Open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P or Cmd+Shift+P).
2. Select UI: Customize Color Scheme.
3. Edit Color Settings: Modify the color values for the scopes listed above in your user color scheme file.

Further options can be configured within the SBSCompare.sublime-settings file, accessible via Preferences -> Package Settings -> Compare Side-By-Side.

Open Source and Community Driven

Compare Side-By-Side is released under the MIT license, encouraging open contribution and modification. The project welcomes pull requests from the community to further enhance its features and usability. It is a fork of an earlier project, demonstrating its evolution and community-driven nature.

By integrating Compare Side-By-Side into your Sublime Text workflow, you gain a robust and user-friendly tool to compare side by side code and text, ultimately boosting your development efficiency and code quality.