The files are opened in two side-by-side editors. The text view is used, offering a better view of the differences.
The two editors are kept in sync, so if you scroll the text in one of them, the other one will also scroll to show the difference. The differences are indicated using highlights connected through colored areas. You can use the Go to modification buttons to navigate between differences or simply select a change by clicking it in the overview ruler located in the right-most part of the window. The overview ruler contains also a success indicator in its upper part that will turn green in case there are no differences and red if some differences are found. You can also do this by clicking a colored area between the text editors.
You can edit either the source or the target file. The differences are refreshed when you save the modified document.
Both editors provide a contextual menu that contains edit, merge and navigation actions.
The Find/Replace dialog is displayed by pressing Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on Mac). Find/Replace options are also available: F3 used to perform another search using the last search configuration, and Shift+F3 to perform another search in backward direction using the last search configuration.
If the compared blocks of text are too large and you want to see the differences at a finer level, you can use the comparison at Word or Character level.