It is a supercharged version of XCopy that has been included with Windows since Vista. If you are not familiar with RoboCopy, and you do a lot of mass copying of files, you need to stop what you are doing and learn about it pronto. Necessity mothered some invention and I found an inventive way to use a combination of command switches on RoboCopy to perform the comparison. BC was having a lot of trouble and choked on many of my comparisons. However, today I was doing a reconciliation as part of a very large file migration project that required comparing two folders that each contained hundreds of millions of files spread across thousands of sub-folders. It is an excellent utility, and one that I think should be among the first utilities any developer should install on a new machine. VSCode diffs are a great thing to add to your developer toolbox.In most cases where I need to compare two folders recursively on a Windows system I use my go-to tool Beyond Compare. It also helps to remind yourself of the changes you've made from the master version of a file on git once in a while. I hope this helped you! Diffing in VS Code is very useful for quickly seeing changes between two files.

Note: you can also edit files from within the diff panels! VS Code is awesome. If you would like to compare your local file changes with the latest git version of a file, click the git icon in the activity bar, then select the file that you would like to compare.

Paste this command into the command line with your file names.Įxecuting this command should bring up the diff panel, just like it did from the explorer window. This is convenient if you want to build up muscle memory of typing out the commands into the terminal. Note: you can also CTRL-select both files, right click on one, and select 'Compare Selected' to achieve the same thing: You should see the diff panel appear once you've completed these steps: Right click on the second file and 'Compare with Selected'ģ.

Right click the first file and 'Select for Compare'Ģ. This is the quickest, easiest way to bring up the diff panels. There's two primary types of diffs you can do with VS Code.

Compare folders