file comparison tools: binary files / text files

[jeeswg]

- I'm looking for any good freeware file comparison tools.
- I find WinMerge to be great for text comparison, with one exception, comparing 2 files with the same number of lines, e.g. adding indentation programmatically and comparing before and after. In such cases I would like it simply to compare line 1 with line 1, line 2 with line 2 etc, but instead, as it usually does, it looks for the biggest lump of matching text etc etc, which in this case is less helpful. (A mode to force line-by-line comparison would be great. I can add in line numbers manually as a workaround, before comparing, but this isn't great.)
- I don't have a favoured binary comparison tool. (WinMerge can do binary comparison but it's not very good, sometimes I convert binary files to hex strings, adding periodic line breaks, and compare those with WinMerge, this is better, but not always great.) Thanks.

- A note on WinMerge line-by-line comparison:
- WinMerge 2011, a fork of WinMerge, has a 'File, Open..., Compare As: Lines Numbered' option, but it's equivalent to adding in line numbers manually.
- This scriptlet was added to WinMerge 2011 as standard:
WinMerge • View topic - line by line comparison
http://forums.winmerge.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=365

- Link:
Comparison of file comparison tools - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... ison_tools