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Build ID: Eclipse 3.7m5 CQ:WIND00240314 As an Eclipse / Workbench user, I want to use the integrated diff/merge tool to compare files that are outside my Workspace, or compare a workspace file against a non-workspace file. I'd intuitively expect a "File > Compare Files..." menu entry which allows choosing both the left and the right file from either inside or outside the workspace. And, I'd expect the right-click > Compare With... submenu to also include an "another file" entry which would allow picking the file to compare with from either the Workspace or outside the Workspace (with a history dropdown). Many other simple programmer's editors support such functionality, so I'd expect it from Eclipse too. Using an external tool such as WinMerge can be used as a workaround, but that's missing advanced features of Eclipse Compare such as the integrated JDT formatter when editing in the diff tool. Workaround: Link to external file/folder in order to bring them into the workspace for comparison. Can use drag-and-drop with "link files" option on Windows. But this workaround is not intuitive at all.
Another workaround is to install AnyEdit Tools: http://andrei.gmxhome.de/anyedit/index.html
The functionality is there, but very hard to find from the UI. Select an arbitrary file in the project explorer, then use Ctrl-3 and type "Compare with Other Resource". This will open a dialog to select resources to compare and you can actually select external files and folders there.
