Visual Studio Code: Comparing Text Files

Visual Studio Code has built in, albeit unintuitively, file comparison. To diff two files, from Explorer right click on the first file to compare and choose Select for Compare from the context menu:

In the screen snippet above the ParametersW10.json file was clicked on initially. To choose the second file to diff, from Explorer right click on a file and choose Compare with Selected:

In the screen snippet above the 20200919072819442ParametersW10.json file was selected to be compared to ParametersW10.json. 

The difference between the two files is shown as follows:

The upper right corner of the diff provides some handle tools for managing the file compare:

The options are defined as follows:

• Up arrow: navigate to previous difference
• Down Arrow: navigate to next difference
• Backwards P:Show leading/trailing whitespace differences