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Graphical difftool for Linux that supports word wrap/line break

Using Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) I would like to use a graphical diff tool (like Meld, KDiff3, Kompare, etc.) that supports automatic line breaks. What I mean by that is that I would like to see the entire text in the graphical window that's available to me, without the need of scrolling horizontally, as this is incredibly painful when using text (scientific papers) with very long lines (i.e., long paragraphs).

I've checked all "top X diff tools" webpages and tried more than 10 graphical diff tools. None of them supports automatic word wraps/line breaks (or however they are called). In all of them, long lines are just endlessly long lines.

Fun fact: I know that Meld did support this at some point, but apparently it does not any more. For some extremely weird reason, they've just removed this feature.

To be more precise, KDiff3 actually does support this, but it seems that it does not allow to edit the text being displayed, which is another extremely essential feature since diff tools get "confused" very easily, so one needs to constantly do some minor alterations to the text so that the differ keeps recognizing similarities.

So, what tool can be recommend? It's driving me crazy that I can't use a differ any more...

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Prof.Chaos Avatar asked Jan 30 '26 06:01

Prof.Chaos


1 Answers

The Meld utility has the option.

In the menu bar, click on MeldPreferencesEditorEnable text wrapping.

I can confirm it's available as of the 3.20.2 release.

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SurpriseDog Avatar answered Jan 31 '26 23:01

SurpriseDog