Can you suggest a Mac OS app to compare conflicted notes and display differences in content?

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1

I write somewhat complicated technical notes, which makes things tedious when I have have conflicted notes that I must compare, edit and merge into one.
Could you recommend an app which would allow me to easily compare notes and highlight the differences.

Any indirect route using for example RTF exports of the conflicted notes or comparing the clipboard clips of both notes is fine.

A solution to this problem would make me much less hesitant to use Bear on multiple devices.

2

2 that I know of off the top of my head:

  1. BBEdit has a “find differences” option that lets you select which 2 files it compares. You could copy/paste the note contents to new text files, or you could export the conflicted notes from Bear as md files and then do the compare.
  2. diff command from terminal. If you are not familiar with this command, you can type man diff in terminal and display the instructions for use. An example is diff path/to/file1.md path/to/file2.md >diff.txt which will compare the files and send the output to a file called diff.txt.
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great suggestion !. I found a solution thanks to your post.

BBEDIT→ open 2 windows (Shift-Cmd-N) → put both windows at the front, side by side → paste one of the conflicting Bear Notes in each Window → BBEDIT Menu Bar → Search → Find Differences→ Compare 2 Front Windows

is exactly what I was looking for.

My notes include many technical snagshots and I would like to see if one if missing. Would you know if BBEDIT can display images which I presume would mean RTFD instead of txt format?.

thanks again very much

2024-12-09_08-31-21
2024-12-09_08-31-211292Ă—590 116 KB

4

You are welcome. To visually compare images in the conflicting notes, why not open each note in a separate window in Bear? BBEdit is a very powerful and useful text editor only.

EDIT:
You also could try exporting the notes from Bear as html with images included with the base64 option. This will create text files that can be compared in BBEdit. If images are the same their base64 encoding will be the same. However you will not see the images as images.

5

@trevor301

BeyondCompare by ScooterSoftware. I’ve been using BeyondCompare for about a decade and wear by it.

For your purposes, I think the non-pro edition would work fine.

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With Beyond Compare, can you only compare files or also text (copy paste from conflicting notes which is simpler and faster than creating 2 RTFs)?. Text containing images also ?
thank you for your post

7

Beyond Compare can definitely:

  • Compare two text files on disk
  • Compare raw text (not on disk) that you can copy/paste into the app or just type into it

I do both of these things on a regular basis.

It has other features as well (like comparing files in directories), but I have never used them, so I can’t speak to them.

I’ve never tried text with images and suspect that might not work. But it looks like there is a free trial, so you could try it out and see if it works well for you or not.

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thank you very much ! very kind of you.