http://meldmerge.org, and like many good programs, it can run on Cygwin, though you will need X Windows up and running. Note that there is a Windows Installer at http://sourceforge.net/projects/meld-installer/, but the result won’t be integrated into your cygwin environment.

"> http://meldmerge.org, and like many good programs, it can run on Cygwin, though you will need X Windows up and running. Note that there is a Windows Installer at http://sourceforge.net/projects/meld-installer/, but the result won’t be integrated into your cygwin environment.

"> http://meldmerge.org, and like many good programs, it can run on Cygwin, though you will need X Windows up and running. Note that there is a Windows Installer at http://sourceforge.net/projects/meld-installer/, but the result won’t be integrated into your cygwin environment.

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Rafe Hart

Thoughts on security, privacy, and building software.

Meld on Cygwin

18 December 2014

Meld is a graphical diff and merge program for comparing files. It is particularly good at helping you review the differences between differing code. The project’s homepage is http://meldmerge.org, and like many good programs, it can run on Cygwin, though you will need X Windows up and running. Note that there is a Windows Installer at http://sourceforge.net/projects/meld-installer/, but the result won’t be integrated into your cygwin environment.

WhatWeb

The requirements for installation are available as cygwin packages, but not for the latest version. While you could spend many hours messing around with packaging GTK3, a better solution is to install the GTK2 version, which was released July 2014. You need to have:

  • python
  • libglib2.0_0
  • python-gobject
  • python-gtksourceview2
  • python-gi
  • intltool
  • itstool
  • rarian

Once these packages are installed, you can download the source code and install with:

# Download the GTK2 version
wget https://download.gnome.org/sources/meld/1.8/meld-1.8.6.tar.xz

# Extract it and change into that directory
tar xvf meld-1.8.6.tar.xz
cd meld-1.8.6

# Then install it
make
make install

After this point you should be able to launch meld from the command line, provided X Windows is running. The shell will wait for meld to exit before continuing, so it’s best to set up an alias to fork it into the background.

alias meld="meld &"