| Compare It! User Interface Basics |
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Read this topic to familiarize yourself with the user interface of Compare It! and with terminology used in this help system.
The Compare It! application window is divided into five areas: the menu bar, the toolbar, and three content panes.
Click here to see an illustration of the Compare It! application window.
Overview Bar
The Overview Bar is used to show an overall picture of the file changes. It uses the same colors as the source and target file panes, so you can quickly determine the types of differences found.
Note the black rectangle that represents the your current position in the file. You can click anywhere in the Overview Bar to jump to that location in the file.
Tip: Right-click in the Overview Bar to jump directly to the nearest difference. This can be very useful in large files, when one change could be represented with a line height of only 1 pixel.
Source and Target Panes
The source pane, on the left, shows the source file. The target file is shown in the right pane, the target pane.
The title bar of the source and target panes shows the name of the file open in the pane. The color of the title bar is matched to your system default active/passive window title color, so you can easily see which pane is active.
Compare It! may display an icon in the title bar of the source and target panes to provide the following information:
 File is read-only. Compare It! is functioning in read-only mode. The file was extracted from an archive file. See Zip File Support for more information. The file was converted to text form by a converter. Changes Only mode is active. This file includes true Unicode characters. See Unicode Support for more information.
In addition, one or more icons can be displayed at the right corner of the title bar to notify you that
something have affected comparison itself:
 Regular expressions were applied to the file; Column range is used.
Tip: To edit the source or target file in another application, click and drag the title bar to that application.
Tip: You can click title bar with right mouse button to display popup menu with system file's Properties.
Virtual Lines
To keep the compared files synchronized, Compare It! uses the concept of virtual lines. These lines are not present in the file, they are only used so you can find differences faster.
Virtual lines are shown as areas of cross-hatches, as shown below. If you don't like hatching, you can disable it by setting same
text and background colors in Options/Colors.
Some examples of how virtual lines are used are:
- Adding virtual lines in the source file to match lines added in the target file or the other way around, adding lines in the target file to match lines added in the source file.
- Virtual lines are automatically added while you are editing a file. For example, as soon as you add one line in the source file (marked by a pencil icon), a virtual line is inserted in the target file.
Color Usage
Compare It! uses different colors to visually identify different kinds of changes made. The standard implementation of Compare It! uses the following default colors: blue for changed lines, green for lines that exist only in the source file, and red for lines that exist only in the target file.
You can change these colors to suit your preferences.
MergeBar
The MergeBar in the source and target panes is used to mark changed lines, and in the target pane, it displays arrow icons that let you copy current differences between the source and target files. Note that you cannot use these arrows to copy single lines, unless the current difference is only one line.
 Click this icon to copy the current difference from the source file to the target file Click this icon to copy the current difference from the target file to the source file This icon appears next to each line that was changed after you used one of the "copy" icons above.
while CTRL is pressed
 Click this icon to insert current difference from the source file
after changes section in the target file Click this icon to insert current difference from the target file
after changes section in the source file
while SHIFT is pressed
 Click this icon to insert current difference from the source file
before changes section in the target file Click this icon to insert current difference from the target file
before changes section in the source file
while CTRL + SHIFT is pressed
 Click this icon to
delete the current difference from the source file Click this icon to
delete the current difference from the target file
Status Bar
In addition to providing standard status information, the status bar allows you to switch edit modes for the source file or the target file, or both. Select or clear the appropriate check box in the status bar.
Note: Use these check boxes to protect the individual files from editing. If you want to switch the editing mode for the application, use the Edit Mode toolbar button.
Status bar will also provide you with color encoding legend, along with number of changes blocks of each type:
Note: You can temporary toggle displaying number of different lines instead by pressing CTRL. In this case numbers will be same as in Statistics.
There is also current Comparison profile indication in Status bar. To change profile, click it's pane with left or right mouse button and
select new profile from popup menu
File Info pane
Info pane provides you additional information about each file: modification date, current cursor line and column, and file type. File type is combined from two indicators - CRLF style and text type.
CRLF style
Historically text files on different platforms are using different special characters to mark line
ending in file - this is called CRLF style. Compare It! can handle all such endings (also when saving files),
and you can see CRLF style of a file in info pane as follows:
- WIN - Windows platform, CRLF sequence (characters #13#10);
- UNIX - Unix platform, LF only (#10);
- MAC - Macintosh platform, CR only (#13);
- WN2 - this style should be unused as errorneous, however I have seen such encoding on Windows;
- UKN - unknown style - used if file consist on single line.
Single file could, of course, include mix of different endings; especially if it has been edited on different platforms.
In this case Compare It! will display first encountered ending style.
Text style
Second part of file type indicator is Text style, which could be one of these:
- TXT - plain text file;
- UNI - Unicode text, either big- or little-endian;
- UTF - UTF8, special type of Unicode encoding.
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