Differences viewer for files

Jump to the next or previous difference.

When the last or first difference is reached, IntelliJ IDEA suggests to click the arrow buttons F7/ Shift+F7 once more and compare other files, depending on the Go to the next file after reaching last change option in the Differences Viewer settings.

This behavior is supported only when the Differences Viewer is invoked from the Commit tool window Alt+0.

Compare the local copy of the previous or next file with its update from the server.

Select a viewer mode: side-by-side or unified. The side-by-side mode has two panels, the unified mode has one panel.

You can edit code and perform Apply, Append, Revert actions in both viewers.

You can change text only in the right-hand part of the side-by-side viewer, or in the lower line in the unified viewer.

You can edit only local versions of your files. You cannot edit files that have read-only status.

Define how the differences viewer should treat whitespaces.

• Do not ignore: white spaces are important, and all the differences are highlighted. This option is selected by default.

• Trim whitespaces: trim whitespaces if they appear in the end and at the beginning of a line (("\t", " ") ).

  • If two lines differ in trailing whitespaces only, these lines are considered equal.

  • If two lines are different, trailing whitespaces are not highlighted in the By word mode.

• Ignore whitespaces: white spaces are not important, regardless of their location in the source code.

• Ignore whitespaces and empty lines: ignores whitespaces and empty lines. The following entities are ignored:

  • all whitespaces (as in the 'Ignore whitespaces' option)

  • all added or removed lines consisting of whitespaces only

  • all changes consisting of splitting or joining lines without changes to non-whitespace parts.
    For example, differences between a b c and a \n b c are not highlighted in this mode.

• Ignore imports and formatting: changes within import statements and whitespaces are ignored (whitespaces within String literals are respected though).

Select the way differences granularity is highlighted.

The available options are:

• Highlight words: modified words are highlighted

• Highlight lines: modified lines are highlighted

• Highlight split changes: if this option is selected, big changes are split into smaller changes.

  For example, A \n B and A X \n B X are treated as two changes instead of one.

• Highlight symbols: modified symbols are highlighted

• Do not highlight: if this option is selected, the differences are not highlighted at all.

  Use the Do not highlight option when you work with the files that were significantly modified. In such cases, highlighting might introduce additional difficulties during a review.

Open a list of available settings.

These commands are also available from the context menu of the differences viewer gutter.

This checkbox only appears if you invoke the Differences Viewer from the Commit Changes dialog with multiple changed files (all of which are deselected), and you explore the differences between them and hit the last difference in a file.

Select this checkbox if you want to include the file you've reviewed into the commit.

Apply differences between panes (in case of the side-by-side viewer) or between lines (in case of the unified viewer).

The chevron buttons can change their behavior:

• Click and to apply changes. This behavior is the default one.

• Press Ctrl to change or to or and append changes.

Click this icon to invoke the list of options allowing you to compare different versions of a file to resolve a conflict.

This option is only available from the context menu of the gutter.

Use this option to explore who introduced which changes to the repository version of the file, and when. The annotations view lets you see detailed information for each line of code, such as the version from which this line originated, the ID of the user who committed this line, and the commit date.

For more details on annotations, refer to VCS annotations.