From menu, select Edit->Options...->General->Disable Splash Screen

Browse to the folder you want to compare (folder contents is shown in the dialog). Do not select any of the files or subfolders, just select the Open-button when "Folder Selection" is shown in filename editbox. If you already selected any of the files or subfolders, just write some nonsense to the filename editbox and select the Open-button. When the filename editbox doesn't contain any existing filename then WinMerge opens the folder.

Unfortunately not. We acknowledge it would be good feature but have no plans to implement it in near future. This can be somewhat worked around by using two WinMerge instances. Or using third path parameter given from command line. See Command Line -chapter for more information.

Not currently. If somebody wants to help/work with cross-platform support (using wxWidgets for example) we are interested, of course.

Which kind of CVS integration WinMerge should have? Adding CVS client features to WinMerge is questionable since there are many good CVS clients already. WinMerge can resolve conflict files, see Resolving Confilict Files.

MRU is the abbreviation for "Most Recently Used", and means the history lists in the Open-dialog which contain the 20 last used files/paths per side.

Yes, enable Detect archive type from file signature option in Archive Options.

This is because WinMerge uses the "Quick Compare" method for large files always. It allows WinMerge to compare large files more efficiently. To test if this is causing the behavior you're seeing, you could raise the limit for the Quick Compare threshold for large files. It is stored in the registry as:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Thingamahoochie\WinMerge\Settings\QuickMethodLimit

You may consider raising this limit if you constantly compare large text files. Be careful to not raise it too much "for just to be sure". 100 MB is too much.

The default value for the limit is 4MB (0x400000).

Mentioned files are plugins written with Visual Basic (6.0). WinMerge installer does not contain Visual Basic runtime files so those plugins cannot be loaded. You can:

When installing from archive (zip, 7z) file you need also Runtimes-package, which contains those files. See the Install instructions.

Maybe your files have different line-ending styles (e.g. Windows and Unix?). WinMerge by default compares also line-ending styles, but you can disable it from Edit->Options / Compare / Ignore carriage return differences.

Try selecting a different font from menu View->Select Font...

This is what we call a "lossy" conversion.

For Unicode files (UCS-2, UTF-8), use WinMergeU.exe.

For ANSI files, this is probably due to code-page problems. If "Use codepage info" is selected from Options, turn that off and see if it helps.

Unfortunately WinMerge supports only non-proportional fonts.

When Automatic Rescan is enabled, WinMerge delays rescanning while user edits files. So there is no rescanning happening when user types text but shortly after user has finished typing. Without this delaying WinMerge would do rescan after every typed letter and editing files would become slow. This delaying especially improves editing of bigger files which can take several seconds to rescan.

There is basic printing support in WinMerge 2.6.0 and later versions. Select File->Print... from the menu.

No, you can't. Many users have requested this feature but we don't have any plans to implement it. We don't believe it would really improve usability.

Use -e command line switch.

Use -x command line switch.

Tell your external program to invoke WinMerge with the /ub option, which tells WinMerge to not add the files to the MRU.

Create a batch file where you add one of these lines (but not both):

And then call this batch file from program.

Do you have plugin installed and or the plugin version matches 7-Zip version? If not, see Installing chapter for instructions for installing.

If the error is something like: "7-zip x.xx missing / Plugin present", then you probably have installed 7-Zip using MSI-installer. There are 7-Zip MSI installers that do not install all the files WinMerge needs (namely 7zip_pad.xml in 7-Zip program folder). Download and run the EXE version of the 7-Zip installer.

"Perry-style" patches are zip-files containing original and changed files in different directories. WinMerge has internal support (surprise?) for handling these files. Just select zip file in question to left side and right side and WinMerge opens zip files contents to folder compare comparing original and altered files.

Unfortunately WinMerge can only use 7-zip.

Yes, enable Detect archive type from file signature option in Archive Options.

Open the file with Windows notepad (eg. Start->(All) Programs->Accessories->Notepad. Choose File->Save As, and in the Save As dialog which appears, look at the dropdown list at the very bottom, labelled "Encoding".

Using WinMerge encoding detection.

For all other cases, to instruct WinMerge to assume that all documents are UTF-8, set the default WinMerge codepage to 65001 (which is Microsoft's code for UTF-8) in Codepage options (Edit->Options from main menu) and then Custom Codepage.

No. It may be added in later versions but until then Win32 port of diffutils can be used. The Win32 port of diffutils (and patch) can be downloaded from GnuWin32 project from SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32

No. The patch tool from GnuWin32 project can be used for patch applying since WinMerge produces GNU/diffutils compatible patch files. See above question.