15 – comparing files and folders with meld

The goal of the tutorial is to explain to you that meld is a very powerful tool . We can use it to compare files but also directories. That is what is great. You can compare 3000 or more articles at once with this tool. It will even tell you if there is a “space” different when comparing files. Anything different is reported in a very visual and pleasing manner.

We show you the differences between folders.

We assume that the arco-i3 folder in my home folder is old and that the arco-i3-master folder in my downloads is the most recent one and we are going to compare the differences. Since there are no differences I will change some setttings and show you what happens. In the other video you will see more differences.

You can compare with meld or you can use the command “git pull”.
Watch out files will be overwritten. You can only use git pull if you did a “git clone” earlier.
If you press CTRL+ H and see a .git folder then you git cloned it.

 

Comparing the changes in the ~/.config/i3 with the download from arcolinux github is even more important. That folder holds all the configuration settings of i3. We changed a lot after 14 tutorials so let us take a look at those changes. Let us check out an actual workflow.

 Use the buttons on the top to select files and folders that are the same or new or modified.

Check out this tutorial to be able to quickly analyze files and folders.