Text Diff

What this tool does

A contract comes back from a counterparty as version three, and the only way to know what changed is to put the two texts side by side. Reading them top to bottom separately misses a single altered number or a deleted clause. This tool compares two versions line by line, greys out matching lines, marks removed lines in red and added lines in green, and preserves the order of both texts so a moved paragraph is easy to trace. It suits draft revisions, configuration files, code snippets and meeting notes — anything that is naturally organised into lines. A quick diff is often the fastest way to confirm that a deployment config only changed the one value it was supposed to, or to see exactly which sentences an editor removed from a document.

How to use it in three steps

1. Paste the older version into the left box and the newer version into the right box. Keep line breaks as they are, since the comparison works line by line.
2. Press Compare. Matching lines are greyed out, removed lines appear in red and added lines in green.
3. Read from top to bottom and check every coloured pair. A line that was edited rather than added will usually appear as one red line followed by one green line. Diff one section at a time when reviewing a long contract, so a cluster of changes stays readable.

Questions people ask

Does it show changes inside a single line?

The comparison is line-based, so an edited line appears as a removed line and an added line rather than highlighting individual words. For very long lines, split them into shorter ones first to see the change more precisely.

Why does a moved paragraph show as many changes?

A line-based diff anchors on order, so moving a block registers as a removal in one place and an addition in another. That is accurate for version control purposes but looks noisier than a word-level comparison.

Can I compare code with different indentation?

Whitespace is part of the line, so re-indenting a whole file will show nearly every line as changed. Normalise indentation in a separate pass before diffing if you only care about logic changes.

How do I compare versions that have different line endings?

Normalise both texts to the same convention first. A file saved with Windows line endings and one saved with Unix line endings can otherwise show every line as changed, which buries the one edit you actually care about.

Privacy: Both versions of a text are compared line by line in this browser tab, so contract wording, deployment configuration and unpublished drafts remain on your device and never reach a server.