Kaleidoscope 4 - Spot the differences, merge in seconds | Product Hunt

Spot the differences, merge in seconds

Hi ProductHunters! 👋🏻

Today, we are thrilled to introduce Kaleidoscope 4 to the world!

While the major version is already at 4, for us, it’s really the sophomore release. Kaleidoscope 3 was the first major update after acquiring the product and giving it a new home.

Back then, we needed to breathe fresh life into an app that had been neglected for a bit too long. That worked beautifully. We received tons of encouraging feedback, and to this day, people are re-discovering Kaleidoscope as the best comparison and merge tool on the Mac.

Now it’s time to show the world if we have what it takes to really evolve the product and make it ready for the future. Please let us know what you think. Do the new features help you to increase your productivity? Are they fun to use?

Some of the new capabilities include:

- Syntax Coloring. This seems like a modest change, but once you’ve used the new version, there is no going back. There are even 3 different themes to choose from, with the default inspired by the default look of Xcode, the IDE most of our users work with.

- New Merge from Comparison. This new command allows you to transform any text comparison to a merge, then enabling you to freely edit a new merged version of your inputs. Users have been asking for ways to edit comparisons, and we think that we found a very elegant solution.

- Text Filters. Often times, text you are comparing contains data that is irrelevant for the task at hand, like timestamps, object addresses or unique identifiers. Text Filters allow you to remove them from the comparison by either hiding them or replacing them with something that matches in the comparison, giving you a much cleaner diff. Now it’s a breeze to compare log files and make sense of what you are seeing.

- Kaleidoscope Prism. We thought hard about how to speed up workflows. This new menu bar app offers both a highly configurable drop window as well as menu commands, with the ability to add global keyboard shortcuts. You need to try that.

- Similar to what we did for lldb in Xcode before, you can now send content to Kaleidoscope from pdb, the Python Debugger, so improve up your python debugging workflow.

- File Properties. In some cases, the decoded content of text or image files cannot show the relevant differences. There may be a change in encoding or line endings between two files, which makes them distinctly different, but still, the content may appear the same. The new File Properties toolbar item and popover help you discover those cases.

- Many more details and refinements. We improved onboarding by adding a new Getting Started window, the new Welcome window offers quick access to recent comparisons, and so much more.

Try out the new Kaleidoscope and let us know about your favorite changes. We’re also eager to hear what we should be working on next. Kaleidoscope is tool aimed to improve your development process, so you need to let us know about your needs!

Thanks for all of your support! 💃