mergers

A visual diff and merge tool written in Rust with GTK4, inspired by Meld.

WARNING: This software is alpha-quality and under active development. It may eat your files, corrupt your data, or silently discard changes. Always keep backups and use version control. You have been warned.

Features

• Two-way file comparison with syntax highlighting (GtkSourceView 5)
• Three-way merge for resolving conflicts
• Directory comparison with recursive scanning and async background diffing
• Git integration — run mergers . to view uncommitted changes
• Inline word-level diff highlighting
• Ignore whitespace / blank lines options
• Find & Replace within panes
• Go to line (Ctrl+L)
• Undo / Redo
• Chunk navigation with keyboard shortcuts
• Chunk map — visual overview strips alongside each pane
• Patch export (unified diff format)
• Swap panes
• Custom pane labels via -L flag
• Directory copy/delete operations
• File watcher — auto-reloads when files change on disk
• Configurable folder filters (exclude patterns like node_modules, .git, etc.)
• Preferences dialog — font, color scheme, tab width, filters, with live preview
• Binary file detection — prevents loading binary files into text buffers

Installation

macOS (Homebrew)

brew install joske/mergers/mergers

This downloads a pre-built binary and pulls in GTK4 and GtkSourceView 5 automatically.

Linux (AppImage)

Download the latest AppImage from GitHub Releases:

chmod +x mergers-x86_64.AppImage
./mergers-x86_64.AppImage

From crates.io

Requires GTK4 and GtkSourceView 5 development libraries (see Building).

cargo install mergers

From source

See Building below.

Usage

# Compare two files
mergers file1.txt file2.txt

# Compare two directories
mergers dir1/ dir2/

# Three-way merge (left, merged, right)
mergers local.txt merged.txt remote.txt

# View uncommitted git changes
mergers .

# Custom labels
mergers file1.txt file2.txt -L "Original" -L "Modified"

Git Mergetool

To use mergers as your git merge tool:

git config merge.tool mergers
git config mergetool.mergers.cmd 'mergers "$LOCAL" "$MERGED" "$REMOTE"'
git config mergetool.mergers.trustExitCode true

Then resolve conflicts with:

git mergetool

Comparison with Similar Tools

Building

Requires GTK4 and GtkSourceView 5 development libraries.

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libgtksourceview-5-dev

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gtk4-devel gtksourceview5-devel

# Arch
sudo pacman -S gtk4 gtksourceview5

# macOS
brew install gtk4 gtksourceview5

# Build
cargo build --release

License

GPL-2.0