WinMerge
Open-source data software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
WinMerge is a free software tool for data comparison and merging of text-like files. It is useful for determining what has changed between versions, and then merging changes between versions.
DeveloperWinMerge Development Team
Initial releaseNovember 20, 2000
Stable release2.16.54.2 (2026.02)[1] 
(27 February 2026) [±]
(27 February 2026) [±]Written inC++
| WinMerge | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | WinMerge Development Team |
| Initial release | November 20, 2000 |
| Stable release | 2.16.54.2 (2026.02)[1] (27 February 2026) [±] |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
| Available in | Multilingual |
| Type | Data comparison |
| License | GPL |
| Website | winmerge |
| Repository | |
WinMerge runs on Microsoft Windows.
Features
- Visual differencing and merging of text files
- Flexible editor with syntax highlighting, line numbers, and word-wrap
- Handles DOS, Unix, and Mac text file formats
- Unicode support (as of version 2.8.0, UTF-8 files are correctly read without a BOM)
- Difference pane shows current difference in two vertical panes
- Location pane shows map of files compared
- Highlights differences inside lines in file compare
- Can also generate HTML report with differences highlighted
- Regular expression-based file filters in directory compare allow excluding and including items
- Moved lines detection in file compare
- Ability to ignore whitespace and letter case changes
- Creates patch files
- Shell integration (supports 64-bit Windows versions)
- Rudimentary Visual SourceSafe and IBM DevOps Code ClearCase integration
- Archive file support using 7-Zip
- Plug-ins
- Language localization via plain-text PO files
- Online manual and installed HTML help manual
- Generates normal, context, and unified patches.
Codebases and forks
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For a planned development of version 3.x [2] no commits have been made to the 3.0 codebase since 2011.[3]
In 2011 a fork of the 2.x codebase titled "WinMerge 2011" was created. This new branch has continued to see active feature and bug fix development. It has also removed ATL/MFC dependencies so that WinMerge can be built using the free Visual C++ Express editions.[4]
