If you have used your Mac for C++ development before you likely have everything installed that you need. Visual Studio requires certain tools to be present on the Mac to enable the remote development experience. The components you need are selected by default. To get started install the latest preview release of Visual Studio 2022 and select the Linux and embedded development with C++ workload.

There is some setup required on the Mac side to enable the support, but then the Mac is treated just as any other remote (Linux) target by Visual Studio. In this latest release, users wishing to develop cross platform C++ applications for macOS can now make use of Visual Studio’s Linux tools with CMake to target the Mac.

Both the files will be opened in the main panel, side by side in inline view mode which is comfortable for comparing the differences.The latest preview version of Visual Studio is now available to download.

Then right-click the second file and choose Compare with Selected.

From the left Explorer panel, right-click the first file and choose Select for Compare from the right-click menu.

Here are the simple steps to compare the contents of two code files in VS Code. So naturally VS code is my go-to tool for file comparison. I am using it for minor project development and even as a simple text editor.

For me, VS Code comes in handy as it is cross platform and I am using it on both macOS and Windows. Even though there are several tools like Beyond Compare, Araxis Merge, etc… which have lot of comparison and merging features, I use Visual Studio Code for quick file comparison during development or otherwise. Lately I got questions asking for a quick lightweight tool to compare code files.

C++ visual studio code mac