BeyondCompare git difftool -d closes immediately without waiting for user

Question

Note: this is similar to WebStorm git difftool -d closes immediately without waiting for user, but for Beyond Compare

When I run git difftool -d with Beyond Compare set as my default difftool, git closes right away without letting Beyond Compare show any comparisons. How do I fix that?

Answer 1

Much like similar issues, I had Beyond Compare open and it likes to run as a single instance. Though, that wasn't my entire problem. My diff tool was referencing the wrong executable. BCompare.exe is the primary executable that will be a single instance if it can. BComp.exe is the executable you should be using for the merge tool.

Why? It is actually kind of cool I think. The second one opens the first if an instance isn't open (obviously). The interesting part here is that the second waits for the associated documents/tasks to be closed in the main program before returning a value. This means that you can open additional files in a Beyond Compare instance opened by git and git will still get a return code for the initial file when you close that file. I am tempted to do some fancy drawing to illustrate, but I currently don't the time or skills to do that.

If that doesn't solve your issue, you can tack on -solo to the command. It will open another UI instance in that case though.