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WinMerge is an open source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare files and folders, presenting differences in a visual format that is easy to understand and manipulate.

Build Requirements

Visual Studio 2017

• Community, Professional or Enterprise Edition
• VC++ 2017 v141 toolset
• Windows XP support for C++
• MFC and ATL support
• Windows 10 SDK

Visual Studio 2019

• Community, Professional or Enterprise Edition
• MSVC v142 Buildtools
• C++ MFC for v142 Buildtools
• Windows 10 SDK

Other utilities/programs

• git
• Inno Setup 5.x and 6.x
• 7-Zip
• Python
• Pandoc

How to Build

git clone https://github.com/winmerge/winmerge
cd winmerge
git submodule init
git submodule update
DownloadDeps.cmd
BuildAll.vs2019.cmd  or  BuildAll.vs2017.cmd

Folder Structure

Source code for the WinMerge program, its plugins, filters, setup program, and various utilities are all kept in the subfolders listed below.

The changelog file is in Docs/Users/ChangeLog.md and it documents both user-visible and significant changes.

Subfolders include:

• Docs
  Both user and developer documentation, in different subfolders.
  Can be browsed by opening index.html in the Docs folder.

• Src
  Source code to the WinMerge program itself.

• Plugins
  Source code and binaries for WinMerge runtime plugin dlls & scripts.

• Filters
  WinMerge file filters which are shipped with the distribution.

• ArchiveSupport
  Source code for the Merge7z dlls, which connect WinMerge with 7-Zip.
  Also this folder is required to compile WinMergeU.exe.
  There is also a standalone installer for Merge7z dlls.

• Externals
  This folder contains several libraries whose sources come from outside WinMerge project.
  They are stored here for convenience for building and possibly needed small changes for WinMerge.
  Libraries include an XML parser and a regular expression parser.

• Installer
  Installer for WinMerge.

• Tools
  Various utilities used by WinMerge developers; see readme files in each.

• ShellExtension
  Windows Shell (Explorer) integration.
  Adds menuitems to Explorer context menu for comparing files and folders.

• Testing
  A suite of test diff files and a script to run them and report the results.
  This folder also has a Google Test subfolder containing unit tests made with Google Test Framework.

• Build
  This folder gets created by the compiler when WinMerge is compiled.
  It contains compiled executables, libraries, the user manual, etc.

• BuildTmp
  This folder gets created by the compiler when WinMerge is compiled.
  It contains temporary files created during the compilation and can be safely deleted.