Doing a diff without touching the command line

Why not use http://sourceforge.net/projects/tkdiff/ tkdiff? Been around forever, since the mid-90s at least. All the kinks are worked out. It's fast. It's efficient. It doesn't require bloated Gnome libraries.

I prefer meld.

KDE has Kompare... But it almost works ;)

Thanks for the pointer to "meld", but it has the same problems as the "diff-ext" touted in the article: lots of dependencies on Gnome libraries, etc etc etc. Total bloat. tkdiff only depends on Tcl/Tk and Gnu diff.

Other visual diffs have the same or worse problems: xxdiff needs PyGtk and Glade. Wow.

And I'm saying this because a visual diff program like any of these is one place a GUI actually helps when programming. Remember, Visual Studio makes you stupid: http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind...

You and only you can prevent the use of IDEs.

Oh, bullhockey.

It's thanks to an IDE that I learned what's really going on in OOP. Seeing interleaved source and assembler put a real "face" on what had only been a vague conception. I learned more in those twenty seconds than I would have learned in any first- or second-year college programming course.

I'm afraid you are confusing diff-ext with yet another visual diff tool. Diff-ext is not one, and it does not pretend to be. Diff-ext can be used with most diff tools out there. I use it with meld and kdiff3. The main requirement to the diff tool is the ability to accept files to be compared as command line parameters.

Diff-ext is designed as bridge between a file manager, be it nautilus (gdiff-ext), konqueror (kdiff-ext), thunar (xdiff-ext) or windows explorer (diff-ext), and a diff tool. Diff-ext extends the context menu of file manager with commands to compare files with an external diff tool or to save file(s) for later comparison. This is why it has dependencies on libraries that are provided by file manager to write extensions. Kdiff-ext, for example, depends on a number KDE libraries. I do not see any problem with these dependencies.

Quoting:Thanks for the pointer to "meld", but it has the same problems as the "diff-ext" touted in the article: lots of dependencies on Gnome libraries ... Other visual diffs have the same or worse problems: xxdiff needs PyGtk and Glade. Wow.

Which is only a problem for people who don't have those libraries. GNOME users all have them. XFCE people as well. Even most KDE folk I know have the GNOME libraries because they use one or two GNOME/GTK apps.