Beautiful UI, a little lacking in features

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.

daGUY about Kaleidoscope