Hey, I'm Jimmy, Developer of Textcompare.io
I'm Jimmy, an indie developer who loves building fast, reliable web tools. I originally built TextCompare.io just to solve my own problem: I was getting honestly pretty annoyed trying to find differences in massive code files or logs, only to watch other diff tools completely freeze up my browser or take forever to load.
Plus, I hated the idea of pasting my private code or API responses into random websites where it gets send and may be saved on some server I don't control. So, I decided to build a tool that runs 100% locally on your own device.
How it actually works
I dug into how differencing engines work and ended up building two robust systems for the tool:
- The Input Engine: We use Microsoft's powerful Monaco Editor (the same tech behind VS Code) to give you a flawless coding and text pasting experience right in your browser.
- The Custom Diff Engine: I implemented my own custom-built diff tool using the Myers Algorithm directly in the browser's memory, featuring 2 distinct comparison styles depending on your visual preference. By keeping all that heavy lifting local, the site can tear through huge 10MB+ file dumps almost instantly without ever pinging a database.