I know this was raised before in 2003 dmitri but the topic lost steam and I think you felt it was hard to implement.

I believe it should be relatively easy to implement.

Here's how WinCVS does it.

1) You set the External Diff setting to point to the external diff tool
2) I assume when WinCVS does a diff it actually downloads the file revision you are diffing against and saves it in a temp location
3) It then opens up the external diff program using a command line containing the filepaths to the two files as parameters. The external diff reads the files and shows the results.

It's literally as easy as passing a command line like "c:\program files\winmerge\winmerge.exe c:\temp\phped_cvs_temp_files\file.12.5.3.php c:\projectfiles\file.php"

I believe this would be a huge time saver for many people and I think it must be easy to implement.

I considered trying to do this using integration scripts but it felt messy. Is there any way at all to consider this? Pairing PHPEd + (free open source) WinMerge would be very powerful and very little time invested on your part.

I wholeheartedly agree that a Diff tool would be a great feature. Rudder's idea to implement it seems reasonable and not too difficult.

It's easy to add some debugging code in a file and then accidentally upload it. I like to do a diff of each file before uploading as a last-minute sanity check.

Another case for a diff tool is when I'm working on a large feature so I've made changes to many files, and then mid-stream I have to do a small bug fix. I can't publish most of my changes, and I may even have to temporarily undo a few changes in order to get the bug fix published. I can't use Smart Sync because I only want to publish a few of my files. Being able to easily identify what the differences are between my code and the live code would be invaluable.

Nate

I wholehertedly agree also. It is hard to understand why the product is not already capable of this. This is a very necessary feature. It would be great to right click on a file in the workspace window and have an option like Diff From Remote.

Follow up to this post. I came accross BeyondCompare 3.0 which works great for comparing (and other features) remote files with the workspace ones. It does a great job. It would still be nice to have some integrated functionality as described above.