Meld is as Good as Araxis Merge but Free

Since I moved back my role to be a software engineer about a year ago, I have started back to use a visual diff and merge tool and I found this free tool called "Meld" . It does exactly Araxis Merge can do and yet it is FREE.

In my very old post: Best Visual File Comparison Software,  I mentioned Araxis Merge is the best and the only drawback is it is NOT free.  Those free tools were not comparative at all but now I think Meld beats them all. The visual is good, merging is cool, you can compare directories and binary files as well. I can't think of any reasons why you won't like it.

Another good thing about Meld is it has the CVS version control comparison but it is only useful if you use CVS. It basically can do a diff to the version that you have in CVS.

Official website: Meldmerge.org


P/S: I haven't tried out the windows version as my development platform is in Linux. I"m using this tool every day. If you're using Linux, you can try to find it in you package installer if it is not installed by default. After you have installed, you can just run "meld" in your terminal.