Araxis Merge 2019.5137

February 14, 2019

Araxis Merge is the two- and three-way visual file comparison/merging and folder synchronization application. Use it to compare, understand and combine different versions of source code, Web pages and other text files, or even text copied and pasted from another application (e.g., Pages or Microsoft Word). Merge integrates with Time Machine, so you can compare older versions of files.

Merge is a compelling choice for software developers, lawyers, product release managers, Web designers and other professionals who work with multiple revisions of text files, including ASCII, MBCS and Unicode files. Merge integrates with many version control (VC) and software configuration management (SCM) systems (e.g. Subversion and Perforce) that allow a third-party comparison/merging tool to be specified.

For legal professionals: instantly identify every change by copying text from different contract drafts being edited in another application (such as Microsoft Word) and pasting it directly into a file comparison window. Many more features.

What’s New

Version 2019.5137:

Enhancements

Merge is fully supported, optimized, and tested on macOS Mojave.
There is a new FAQ item with instructions for resolving a ‘Not authorized to send Apple events to Araxis Merge’ error when running the command-line utilities on Mojave.
When trying to access protected areas of the filesystem on macOS Mojave, Merge now prompts the user if required with instructions for granting Full Disk Access permission.
Lines can now optionally be compared and highlighted based on words, rather than characters.
The pairing of lines within blocks of changed text is now both configurable and much more intelligent. This improves the highlighting of comparison results within blocks of changed text in a wide range of scenarios. For full details, please read the Pairing topic.
Support for line-pairing rules has been added. Line-pairing rules enable Merge to pair corresponding lines in a block of changed text based on particular portions of a line matched by a given regular expression. Judicious use of line-pairing rules can provide excellent results for certain comparisons (e.g. those of localization files in different languages) that previously provided unhelpful results. For further information, see the Pairing and Edit Line-Pairing Rule topics.
Line-pairing within change-blocks is tuneable, both for performance and for choosing a balance between highlighting a pair of lines as a change rather than as a removal and an insertion. For more information, please see Advanced Line-Pairing Preferences.
A new Intelligently split blocks of changed text based on matched line pairs option has been added. When checked, Merge will endeavour to split multiline blocks of changed text into smaller blocks of inserted, removed, and changed text. This splitting is performed intelligently, based on any corresponding pairs of lines that Merge is able to match within the original block of changed text. This option can be very useful in understanding precisely how the compared files are related, and it can also make it easier to propagate individual changes from one file to another. For more information, please see Pairing.
A new checkbox, Show detailed (rather than simple) inline changes within paired lines, is present on the Pairing options page. This replaces the Show simplified inline changes and Show detailed inline changes radio buttons on the Display options page in earlier versions of Merge.
File and folder comparison performance has been substantially improved.
The frame rate when scrolling text comparisons has been substantially improved.
The registration dialog has been reviewed for GDPR-compliance and updated. Personal information is no longer required to activate Merge on a computer. The registration dialog itself explains how any personal data that is provided will be used. Finally, the dialog no longer has an option to give Araxis permission to email users about product updates, since the built-in update-notification mechanism obviates the need to send update emails.
Merge no longer sends to Araxis information about locale, operating system version, and screen size.
Merge no longer sends redundant placeholder registration information to Araxis.
To avoid complicating GDPR compliance, Merge no longer gathers crash reports. Neither does Merge therefore offer to send crash reports to Araxis.
Syntax highlighting support for Scala (.scala) files has been added.
There are new text comparison keyboard shortcuts to pull a corresponding change from the left (Shift+Option+Cmd+→) and right (Shift+Option+Cmd+←) to replace the current change and then to move to next change.
Folder comparisons are now able to pair files with canonically equivalent Unicode filenames that happen to differ in their stored Unicode representation.
The Keyboard Shortcuts article has been updated to describe how to create custom keyboard shortcuts.
The folder comparisons results pane now indicates its focus with a standard focus ring.
The Expressions preference page has been improved.
In a three-way text comparison, the middle (not left) file is now given input focus by default.
Merge for macOS is now able to open certain supported .cmp7 files created by a forthcoming version of Merge for Windows.
HTML, XML, and UNIX diff comparison reports are now always encoded using UTF-8 (without a byte-order mark).
The Oracle OpenJDK Java Runtime Environment bundled with Merge has been upgraded to 11.0.2.
The major version number has been updated to 2019, reflecting the year of release.
The range of macOS versions supported by Merge is now shown in the About Araxis Merge window.
Various copyright notices have been updated.
It is no longer possible to manipulate text comparison expressions via AppleScript.

Defects fixed

Folder comparisons no longer crash when encountering folder names that include combining Unicode Emoji characters.
Folder comparisons no longer crash when encountering certain HTML files that incorrectly declare their own character encoding.
It is no longer possible for linking lines to become misaligned in certain circumstances.
On macOS Mojave, the Merge items in system Services menus no longer appear in Japanese when macOS is configured to prefer English.
On macOS Mojave, drop-down lists in table cells are no longer inappropriately displayed in grey text.
The UNIX-diff report Lines of context text field is always visible on macOS Mojave.
Registration information transmitted securely to Araxis is now properly URL-encoded.
In the About Araxis Merge window, the dash in the copyright notice has been changed from a hyphen to an en-dash.
Folder names are shown correctly in the folder column of HTML folder comparison reports.
Document titles and folder names for Subversion and Perforce URLs ending with a / character are now displayed correctly in HTML reports.
Minor memory leaks relating to the toolbar Find menu items have been fixed.
Opening a new binary comparison no longer leaks memory.
Memory is no longer leaked when rearranging tabs.
Resources related to the support of Intel Hex files have been localized.
Unused graphical resources have been removed.
The ↑ and ↓ buttons on the Filters page are no longer enabled when no row is selected.
The contents of the Display preference page have been moved to improve visual centering.
The Description column label on the Expressions preference page is no longer clipped by default.
NSCell-based tables have been replaced with NSView-based ones in the Merge preferences. This eliminates certain problems that were due to bugs in the macOS NSCell implementation.
The version of the AXFinderSync bundle is set appropriately.