How to configure Visual Studio to use Beyond Compare

Question

I would like to configure Visual Studio to open Beyond Compare by default as the diff tool. How can I do this?

Answer 1

In Visual Studio, go to the Tools menu, select Options, expand Source Control, (In a TFS environment, click Visual Studio Team Foundation Server), and click on the Configure User Tools button.

Click the Add button.

Enter/select the following options for Compare:

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Compare
• Command: C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe (replace with the proper path for your machine, including version number)
• Arguments: %1 %2 /title1=%6 /title2=%7

If using Beyond Compare Professional (3-way Merge):

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Merge
• Command: C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe (replace with the proper path for your machine, including version number)
• Arguments: %1 %2 %3 %4 /title1=%6 /title2=%7 /title3=%8 /title4=%9

If using Beyond Compare v3/v4 Standard or Beyond Compare v2 (2-way Merge):

• Extension: .*
• Operation: Merge
• Command: C:\Program Files\Beyond Compare 3\BComp.exe (replace with the proper path for your machine, including version number)
• Arguments: %1 %2 /savetarget=%4 /title1=%6 /title2=%7

If you use tabs in Beyond Compare

If you run Beyond Compare in tabbed mode, it can get confused when you diff or merge more than one set of files at a time from Visual Studio. To fix this, you can add the argument /solo to the end of the arguments; this ensures each comparison opens in a new window, working around the issue with tabs.