File contents panel

 

Figure 9.9. Files contents panel

Files contents panel

The files are opened in two side-by-side editors. The text view is used, offering a better view of the changes.

The two editors are kept in sync, if you scroll the text in one of them, the other 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 on it in the overview ruler located in the right-most part of the window. Also the overview ruler contains a success indicator in its upper part that will turn green in case the are no differences and red if differences are found. You can also do this by clicking on 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.

You can right-click the text editors for the "Cut", "Copy", "Paste" and "Select all" actions. The Find/Replace dialog is displayed by pressing the (Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on Mac )) Also there are available the Find/Replace options: (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.