Updating heavily modified installations of phpBB, WordPress etc. can always be a pain. That’s why most of the time I postpone it till the guilt of running a more than year old version becomes too fierce to resist.

Once in a while, however, the moment finally comes when I have to do this unpleasant task. This time my installations were so customized, that trying to merge all the changes without a decent versioning tool was almost impossible. I didn’t want to set up a fully blown SVN server, so I looked for some decent Windows diff tool, which could also handle recursive directory comparisons.

Having tested some of the open-source tools available, I must admit I really liked WinMerge.

What’s so nice about it?

• allows visual differencing and merging
• handles directories without a hassle
• quite decently laid-out
• sufficiently good editor for quick fixes
• provides a nice visual on the structure of differences (the vertical pane on the left)
• plus some other nice features (and hey, it’s GPL)

Latest version can be obtained from: http://winmerge.org/