I have two ~1 GB files that I want to do a side by side diff of. Solutions I have tried:
diff
– Works quickly but doesn't output side-by-side.diff -y
orsdiff
– This outputs side-by-side but it outputs the entire file – not just the changes, so they are impossible to find.icdiff
– Just too slow (it's written in Python so no surprise there).ydiff
– Not actually tried but it is also written in Python so I assume it will also be very slow.- KDiff3 – Crashed.
- Xcode FileMerge – Too slow (gave it a few minutes of non-responsiveness).
- Beyond Compare – Max 500MB limit.
- Meld – Made a little progress but far too slow to be useful.
vimdiff
– Loads the files successfully and actually displays a side-by-side diff, but the colour scheme makes it unreadable, and normal things that you'd expect from a sane program do not work, e.g. pressing up to scroll up.
Best Answer
The best I have so far is:
However unfortunately that doesn't show you any context lines.
I found another solution using
grep
which seemed ok but it uses a regex and is just too slow.