This means that to use these applications for legal documents (which are usually DOCX or PDF files, not text files), it’s necessary to copy and paste text from a document to these applications. The next two applications include features that are aimed at text comparison, not document comparison. Kaleidoscope also offers ways to search the documents you’re comparing, as well as a simple way to switch among several documents that you want to compare. Comparing documents with Kaleidoscope couldn’t be easier: dragging the files that you want to compare to Kaleidoscope’s icon in the dock is enough to get started.

Kaleidoscope by Black Pixel is a Mac app that’s dedicated to comparison-not only of text files (RTF, DOC, DOCX, and more), but also image files and the contents of folders. In other words, these screenshots don’t necessarily show what you get out of the box with these apps, but rather what you can get after some minor tinkering.) Kaleidoscope (In all of the screenshots below, I’ve made adjustments to app preferences, mainly to the font used to show text. However, there are a few Mac apps-intended for software development, but applicable to legal documents-that can get you some of the benefits of a software development working process. Some popular document management systems offer ways to create a comparison file using third-party comparison software, but this isn’t the same as clicking the current version of a document and instantly seeing how it’s different from the last version of the document (along with tools to manage differences). Document management systems used by lawyers (the rough opposite number of version control applications used by software developers) typically (and maybe universally) don’t work this way. These kinds of working processes, while routine for software developers, aren’t readily available to lawyers. You might not even use Word to make certain changes because you can make basic changes using the controls in a version control application. There’s never a brief moment of panic when you forget to turn on track changes in Word before you start editing a document, because track changes isn’t necessary.

Comparisons generally aren’t even created as separate files (again and again and again, as a document changes). Comparisons aren’t exchanged as separate files, because everyone (rightly) expects everyone else to be able to generate diffs on their own. The working processes that these applications enable in software development are very different from typical working processes in legal services. Tower, SourceTree, and similar apps also usually offer basic editing tools: for example, you can revert selected changes if you change your mind, or push only some changes to your source code repository and worry about other changes later. (The text in these examples is from the Wikipedia article on the diff utility.) What this looks like in practice is a diff (similar to a redline) shown within a version control application. There’s no “ track changes,” and you don’t “run a redline.” Instead, comparisons are essentially already done, all the time.

In software development, comparing one version of a file to another generally is not a separate step in a working process. Like lawyers, software developers routinely compare different versions of text (source code, not legal documents) as they work-but the way software developers typically go about this is very different, and arguably better, than the way lawyers typically go about this. When you work with text, as you certainly do in law, you often need to be able to compare one text to another easily and quickly.

Mac free utility to compare folders