Kaleidoscope App Reviews

Its a nice looking app. When the built-in comparison settings apply its absolutely elegant to use. Additional download from the website offers a ksdiff command line utility which is awesome for whipping up some ad hoc integrations. When the built-in comparison settings stop applying there is very little configurability in the product. Still no functionality to ignore white-space/line endings in compared text files for example which is a fairly ridiculous omission at this price point. No customization for any of the comparison algorithms at all as a matter of fact which sadly renders the product highly unsuited to most non-trivial problem domains.

Anyone who develops with Xcode knows the pain of merging its project.pbxproj files, a mapping of all the source code, resources, and build configuration in your project. Its an arcane nested key-value store that only Xcode and a small handful of third-party utilities know how to parse. One missing semicolon in a git merge and the whole thing is kaput! Normally, this means you have to merge non-trival changes by selecting one version, and re-doing all the changes in the other manually. If your project file is 4000+ lines long and you need to ship tomorrow, theres no time for that. Kaleidoscope will walk you through every single block of changes, so you can isolate the non-trivial ones and test them individually. This tool just saved me several hours of trial-and-error changes through the Xcode GUI. That’s worth every penny.

This app is really quite nice. Totally neat that its flexible enough to diff a wide variety of things; thats a cool surprise. The following focuses on code diffs, as thats what Ive used: The applications UI is very good: - The UI itself is clean minimalist; something someone that appreciate Mac style would appreciate, IMHO. - It presents two options for viewing diffs, called something like "block" and "fluid" (Im not sure if thats exactly); with the primary difference being whether (a) whitespace is inserted into one side or the other in order to keep common code blocks inline, or (b) if the gaps are close and the lines joining the common sections is the only indicator theyre common. - You also have the option to choose whether to use colors to differentiate code blocks as well. All in all the diff presentations work pretty well. Oddly enough, they still come in a distant second to the most awesome diff tools Ive come across yet: Ecplipses built in diff tools. Their presentation is somehow less cluttered and therefore easier to read. That said, this diff application is wrapped in eclipse. It also features excellent integrations with Git, SVN, and various applications to it can automatically be invoked, including from the command. So its a solid four, if not four and half star app. Note that this does have Eclipse diffs nifty ability to compare directories and the source files within them, which sets them apart from pretty much every other tool Ive used.

Its a very well-designed app and enjoyable to use. However, it does seem slow on loading tabs when I drill-down to a sub-directory. I also wish it could ignore whitespace.

Doesnt support "ignore line endings". Doesnt support "ignore whitespace". This means diff-ing files in my git repos will, often as not, generate diffs containing every line in the file. Once these features are in place, it will be a really nice app. Until then, Im asking for a refund.

I use it for comparing .Rnw and .tex files. The UI is very intuitive. One can spot the differences very quickly. On the other hand, it is rather expensive but I have not found any comparable alternatives for less.

Relatively easy to use and intuitive. I have installed the software on very different machines with the same result: consistent crashes. Even with the incessant crashing Kaleidoscope has been useful. But $70 for a piece of software that is unstable? Unacceptable.

It’s beautiful. Says so several times in the description. But it doesn’t actually do a great job of diffing. It will often mark a line as changed, when it should clearly be be marked as one deleted and one inserted line. When this happens, it throws off the rest of the document. There is no way to manually mark a line to prevent this from happening. You just have to get as far as you can in Kaleidoscope, then close it and either finish your work in a different diff app, or manually make the changes in a text editor. For $70, that’s rediculous. I need more than beauty. I need it to work as intended, and the fact that it often doesn’t is really frustrating.

I work as a web site designer/developer and ran into a situation recently where this app became very helpful. One of my client’s sites became altered by an attacker, and I used Kaledioscope to differentiate between a backed-up version of the web site and the most recent, infected version. I was able to get through this task with only minor difficulty, and for the most part, the app worked like a charm. The flaws other reviewers have pointed out are valid, however. Does it crash? Yep. Does it have problems with an entire document being thrown off by a single line of changed code? Yep. And are the developers slow to update it? Yep. The program looks beautiful and mostly functions well, but it really could use some maintenance updates. For the price of the app, it would be nice to see those happening more than once every six months.

File copy crashes every time - just done work any more,

I’ve been an avid user of webstorm/phpstorm and use the merge / diff tools a lot. In wanting to try a different IDE, I choose Kaleidoscope, and have regretted the $70 purchase since. Compared with the web/phpstorm merge tool: - It is unable to do selective code merges (eg, you can’t click on an arrow to shift code from one pane to the other, you have to manually copy / paste it) - In diff view, you cannot do in-place text editing - Was unable to figure out how to have it perform ‘just use this file for the merge’

This app is close to being great. But then, the flaws are so huge, and so easy to fix, one wonders if the team that developed it has forgotten about it. As it is, it should be an embarassment to Black Pixel. Please note the issues mentioned in my review are NOT fixed in version 2.1. Here’s what’s wrong with the app. When you diff two folders A and B, I believe it’s hashing every single file in folder A before it even checks whether the file exists in file B. If the file doesn’t even exist, no need to hash, yet the app must be doing SOMETHING during the many minutes, sometimes hours, it spends processing a folder with thousands of files that turns out to have no corresponding files in the other folder. This is an operation that should take a few seconds at the most if folder A has files and folder B doesn’t. Sometimes, when running long folder diffs, it shows activity indicators. Sometimes, it doesn’t. It can go for hours with no activity indicator, then finally say after you sleep and wake up in the morning, show the results it was working on. OK, good that it eventually gets there, but the activity indicators should work. Also the app does not always check the results of a merge often enough. This is hugely frustrating. You can make two folders match by copying files from one side to another, and then the app will sit there for half an hour or longer showing that the folders are still mismatched, when they arent. I suspect it’s going through the rehash of each and every file again, but it seems like there should be some more clever ways to do this that would be faster. Cache stuff in memory, intercept file writes to make sure you have a good list of changed files, then check only the changed files, not every file. If I change 1 file in a directory with 10,000 files you shouldn’t check every file again. If you run out of memory, write a bit of light weight metadata to disk. The UI is not updated often enough in general. When files are being copied, it sometimes says ‘Copying…’ and sometimes doesn’t. It doesn’t shown any indication of which files are being copied, so if you have multiple tabs and come back to one where you’ve already started the copy, it doesn’t let you know that. You may try to copy again, and it will give you an error saying the file already exists at the destination. OK, well now that we’ve checked and seen it already exists, how about updating the UI to reflect that fact? Nope. The indicator colors showing whether something is different are way too light. They look like shades of white, so you often have to adjust your screen angle to make sure you’re seeing the differences clearly. Other than those things… well it’s still a useful app that lets you do folder and file diffs fairly easily. So if you need something like this, go for it, but be aware that it is a neglected, unloved app that will give you some frustration.

- Update (1 star) - Kaleidoscope is completely unusable on El Capitan, and was already doing really badly on previous versions of OS X. It frequently fails to load up folder and file comparisons, and even when it is working, it often stops comparing and has to be completely restarted to get it working again. Folder comparisons sometimes show that files and folders have changes, then when opening them up there aren’t any differences. It’s horrendously bad and really shouldn’t be for sale anymore. There’s no way Apple would have authorized this app if it had to pass through a review today. It hasn’t been updated in 18 months, despite massive bugs. At this point, you’d have to be insane to spend money on this app. - Previous Review (2 stars) - I continue to be disappointed by Kaleidoscope. In general, its only so-so as a diff tool. There are a number of things it mislabels as additions or modifications, and its not great at separating groups of changes like it claims to. The bigger issue here is that it only offers a raw diff, so its mostly useless for comparing two XML files that may have changed spacing and formating, but contain similar content. One of the biggest problems is performance and lack of decent multi-threading. Whenever I compare large folders of a few hundred files each, the app freezes up for a very long time. Not only does it lock up the window loading these folders, but every window, regardless of what they are comparing. There are also a lot of basic usability issues, especially regarding keyboard shortcuts and basic operations, that dont work correctly. Ive reported many of the issues and bugs Ive seen to the developers, including screenshots, videos, and assorted other samples, but a lot of it has been dismissed as issues theyre not interested in fixing. After 6 months without an update or even a simple bug fix, Ive got a feeling theyve abandoned the app but dont want to stop making sales. I would strongly recommend staying away from Kaleidoscope, even if a new version finally comes out.

Kaleidoscope is the most attractive, native-feeling diff tool for OS X. But the app has grown stale, with over 18 months since the last update of any kind. When the developer is asking $70 for a license, that’s not acceptable. Read the other reviews to see that there are ongoing issues with the app that are being ignored.

As other people have said, this appears to be abandonware. Last updated April 30, 2014. The strange thing is that Ive read probably 6 separate blog posts by people saying how great it is to work there. But their only products are this app, NetNewsWire and Versions (do people still use Subversion)? I just dont understand whats going on. What exactly are they doing that makes them too busy to fix this app?

There’s no question this is the best-looking OS X diff/merge tool by far. Most other Mac diff tools look like what they are – crummy ports of non-native clients that do just enough to run on the Mac, but stop there. I think it’s fair for Kaleidoscope to command a premium price; there’s certainly value in having a beautiful and easy-to-use interface for a tool you use every day. That said, Kaleidoscope falls a little short in terms of features; if you’re going to charge a premium price “just” for the UI, you should at least match what lower-cost and free clients are capable of doing. So far I’ve come across two annoyances that the free (but ugly!) DiffMerge tool handles better. The big one is that you can’t edit files directly in Kaleidoscope at all. So if you want to make any sort of manual edit – anything other than merging whole blocks of changes back and forth – you have to jump back and forth between Kaleidoscope and a separate text editor. In DiffMerge, you can make inline edits while you’re merging, so anything you need to do can be done within one window. A second, smaller annoyance is that Kaleidoscope doesn’t automatically jump to the next difference after you merge the previous one – you have to do this manually (command-left/right to merge, command-down to move). DiffMerge recognizes that 99% of the time after you merge a difference, the very next thing you want to do is move to the next difference, so it does both as one operation. One final nit is that when working with inserted lines, you can’t select the gap in the opposing file where the insertion would go. For example, say File A and File B are identical, but in File A you’ve inserted a new line of text between two existing lines. To merge the change over to File B, you have to select the new line in File A; you can’t select the gap between lines in File B where the change would go. Overall, I do like the app a lot. I just hope it isn’t abandoned – the last update was in 2014, as is the most recent post on the Kaleidoscope Twitter account.