Pressing the comparison shortcut keys will perform a super-quick comparison between the two files and display the result. The simpler way is to use the keyboard shortcut Alt + D (Option + D on Mac). STEP 2: Once the files to be compared are open, you can do the comparison in two ways.

Note that this comparison works on any text based files such as.

STEP 1: Start Notepad++ application on your computer and open the two text files that you want to compare. TIP: You can download and install more useful Notepad++ plugins from the following page: The rest of this tutorial will assume that you have downloaded and installed the ComparePlugin plugin to your Notepad++ installation folder (simply put the plugin files into the plugins folder). It is one of the best Notepad++ plugins and it is one that I use frequently while coding. The plugin is called ComparePlugin and it is available for download on this link. Notepad++ doesn't offer file comparison feature by default, hence, we will use a free plugin to do this task. Now, let's see how file comparison in Notepad++ works. This is especially handy while doing revisions in your code, checking multiple versions of the same files, comparing lists, comparing the same resources you have downloaded from different sources, writing articles or updating posts on your blog. One of the highly useful editing tasks that you can do on Notepad++ (thanks to a great plugin) is to compare the contents of two files side by side, with the click of a button, as long as they are text based and can be opened by Notepad++. You can think of it like a much improved version of the basic Notepad application on Windows or the TextEdit on Mac.

With Notepad++, you can create any type of text-based files, edit HTML files, edit CSS files and work on other programming related tasks. Although it's not a WYSIWYG web design software, it can still be considered as a web design software since you can use it for any type of design, coding and development related work such as writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Python, ASP code and others. Notepad++ is a widely used text editor (source code editor) software that is available in multiple languages.

Notepad++ compare files windows