Handle With Linux

Diffuse

Diffuse also has a nice clean interface and it has some interesting features. It has a nice coloring scheme for differences. The differences are easy to find and there is a map in the right margin.
There's also:
Converting between dos/unix formats
Easy navigation with keys for next difference, previous difference, first difference, last difference,etc.
2 and 3 way merging
Inline editing (2 mouseclicks for editing mode)

Diffuse has support for the major versioning systems:
Bazaar
CVS
Darcs
Git
Mercurial
Monotone
Subversion
SVK

And Diffuse also has syntax highlighting for 25 different programming languages.
It's not feature filled, but if you compare code a lot you should really try this.

click on the screenshots for larger images:

Easydiff

Easydiff Allows comparison and merging of files but also no editing directly of the opened files.

click on the screenshots for larger images:

TkDiff

TkDiff has a nice clear interface and color coding, it also allows editing via a menu option which opens a new screen. TkDiff allows for configuration of external editing utilities and external diff command.
Some of it's features:

show line numbers
show change bars
show graphical map of diff's (places markers in the margin)
ignore blanks
inline diff's
scrollbar synchronization option

click on the screenshots for larger images:

Meld

Meld is by far the best looking linux text comparison utility, it supports most features you would expect from such a tool.
It has in line editing, a nice coloring scheme, syntax highlighting, file and directory comparison and a svn,cvs,bazaar,mercurial browsing.
It's also possible to start meld from your working copy directory, this will give you a recursive directory diff with all your changed files in red. Just click on one of the files to get a diff.
It has less features than xxdiff but personally I think it looks a bit better.
Meld is easy to use, and it was my best choice on the first hand. The only thing with meld is that it isn't as configurable as other tools. There are a lot of features implemented and they are always there. I couldn't find a way to configure the colors for instance.

When comparing very big files, and the scrolling is going slow. Change the style of the central bar this will make things run a little more smooth.

click on the screenshots for larger images:

xxdiff

xxdiff is also a great comparison tool, it's build with programmers in mind. Supports most features other diff programs have. Editing is done in a new window, so not inline. Fully configurable by rc file. Fully scriptable and has a gui-less mode. This is very nice because you can build scripts to run it without a gui interface.Very easy to integrate with scripts and it uses external diff programs so you can choose which diff utility you use. At the website some example scripts are available. For comparing sql databases for example!

some of the features:

xxdiff has features to assist in performing merge reviews/policing.Approving source code changes before they get merged into a source tree.
Can unmerge CVS conflicts in automatically merged file and display them as two files, to help resolve conflicts.
Uses external diff program to compute differences: works with GNU diff, SGI diff and ClearCase's cleardiff, and any other diff whose output is similar to those.
Fully customizable with a resource file.
Look-and-feel similar to Rudy Wortel's/SGI xdiff, it is desktop agnostic (i.e. will work equally well with KDE or Gnome).
Features and output that ease integration with scripts.

And some special features you'll find here:

xxdiff-secrets

click on the screenshots for larger images:

SVN support

If you have a need for a full fledged GUI SVN diff tool, try RapidSVN this can be configured to use an external diff utility. So for instance you can configure RapidSVN to use meld or xxdiff. Then you have an svn interface and from RapidSVN you can choose to diff to HEAD or diff to Base. You can edit the files in your chosen diff tool and save them. Files will be shown as changed in RapidSVN immediately.

Office and ODF comparison support

If your looking for a tool to compare .doc or open document .odf files in Linux, I'm afraid your stuck with commercial tools. I haven't found any open source diff utility which has the capability of differencing these files. It seems like there's a function to do such a thing in open office itself, though I didn't test this. I assume there are perl packages available which will easily do this so if you no a little perl and you need this, you know what to do.
I found one commercial tool available for Linux that claims to have this functionality, among a rather impressive list of features by the way.

deltopia DeltaWalker for Linux

Office and PDF documents
Text extraction and comparison of Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and Adobe PDF documents.

I didn't test this because I downloaded the trial version, but there was a invalid serial key in the file.
If anybody has any experience with this tool, please leave a comment.

A more complete list of file comparison tools (including other operating systems) can be found in the wikipedia article:
Comparison of file comparison tools

Beyond Compare

Beyond compare is a commercial tool, it seems to be very popular with windows and apple users.
It has become available for Linux users too.
It looks nice and has a big feature list, but it costs money.
screenshot gallery is here:

http://www.scootersoftware.com/moreinfo.php?zz=gallery

Miss something here?

If you think a tool deserves a place on this list, while it isn't there. Please leave a comment.
So I can add it here. If you think the article can be improved, feel free to leave a comment.
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