Ignoring svn folders in WinMerge

Question

I'm trying to recursively compare two subversion working copy folders using WinMerge.

Unfortunately, WinMerge displays lots of differencing files inside of the subversion control folders (.svn or _svn).

Is it possible to somehow exclude the subversion folders from the comparision? Or is there another (free) diff-tool which is able to do this?

Answer 1

WinMerge handles this just fine. You want to create and use a filter. Under Tools/Filters, create a new filter or modify an existing one. It will look like this:

## Ignore Java class and jar files
f: \.class$
f: \.jar$

## Ignore subversion housekeeping folders
d: \\.svn$
d: \\._svn$

Save it, then when selecting items to merge, select the filter you defined from the Select Files or Folders dialog box. Bonus points - It will save this and use it as a default for future merges.

Answer 2

WinMerge (Version 2.12.4) already includes a filter to exclude soure control files and directories, and it's called Exclude Source Control. It works for Subversion, CVS, Git, Bazaar and Mercurial, and it doesn't require you to create a filter, you just have to apply it during the comparison.

Answer 3

I found line filters to be very lacking. I developed regular expressions filter yesterday using Boost Regex library.

I feel it does the job.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/regexfilterforw/files/

Feel free to try.

Answer 4

WinMerge (Version 2.12.4) already includes a filter, but at least in my installation, the filters for Subversion, Git and Bazaar were commented.

Tools->Filters->Filefilters->"Exclude Source Control" (double click to edit).

Edit the lines so in the end looks like this:

d: \\.svn$ ## Subversion working copy
d: \\_svn$  ## Subversion working copy ASP.NET Hack
d: \\cvs$   ## CVS control directory
d: \\.git$ ## Git directory
d: \\.bzr$ ## Bazaar branch
d: \\.hg$ ## Mercurial repository