Archive Comparison Pro

Pro feature

This feature requires a Pro licence. Activate your licence to unlock it.

Supported formats

Diffract opens the following archive formats directly, without requiring manual extraction:

• .zip
• .tar.gz / .tgz
• .jar

Opening an archive comparison

1. Open a new comparison tab.
2. Set the left path to one archive file and the right path to another.
3. Diffract detects the archive format and displays both as aligned directory trees.

No extraction step is required. Diffract reads archive entries directly from the compressed stream.

Reading the tree view

The archive tree works identically to the directory comparison view:

• Entries are listed with Changed, Added, or no badge.
• Directories (or zip entry prefixes) are listed first, then files.
• Click any file row to open a side-by-side comparison of that entry's content.

Drilling into a file

Clicking a changed file entry extracts both versions into a temporary buffer and opens them in a new file comparison tab. The tab's path bar shows the entry path inside the archive (e.g. archive.zip!/src/main.js). The comparison is fully functional - you can apply changes and edit in place, though saving writes back to the virtual buffer, not to the archive itself.

Note

Archive comparison is read-only at the archive level - Diffract does not write modified entries back into the archive files.