WinMerge 2.16.59 Beta Release Notes

• About This Release
• What Is New in 2.16.59 Beta?
• Known issues

October 2026

About This Release

This is a WinMerge beta release which is meant for preview the current state of WinMerge development. This release is not recommended for the production.

Please submit bug reports to our bug-tracker.

What Is New in 2.16.59 Beta?

General

• [BUG] MDI window controls (Minimize/Maximize/Close) are completely hidden unless hoveredbug (#3511)(PR #3552)

• Add an option to remember and restore splitter positions for text, image, web page, and binary comparisons. (PR #3611)

Appearance

• BugFix: Fix cramped toolbar icon spacing at high DPI

• Migrate toolbar and margin icons from BMP to PNG (GDI+ decoding) (PR #3510)

• Rebuild toolbar buttons based on active window (PR #3631)

File compare

• BugFix: Fix Shift+Insert paste going to file instead of Filter Bar (#3585)

• BugFix: Fix cursor movement and scrolling across gaps created by the display filter (#3601)(PR #3622)

• BugFix: Fix initial status bar display for file comparisons (PR #3644)

• BugFix: Fix issue [BUG] Keyboard shortcut to "Copy to right" does not work in 3-way merge (#3645)

• BugFix: Fix undo/redo after swapping panes and avoid invalid undo target tracking (PR #3646, PR #3647)

• BugFix: Flush undo groups when deleting text fails

• BugFix: Fix blank line handling in comment difference filtering (PR #3651)

• BugFix: Fix ignored diff ranges with missing trailing EOL (#3653)(PR #3657)

• Show the selection margin when adding a bookmark

• Add an option to prefer the WIC decoder when loading images for image comparison (PR #3537)

• Add Save command to filepath bar context menuheader bar (PR #3654)

• tree-sitter: php and f-sharp grammars update (PR #3656)

Table compare

• Add column range filtering and ignore columns in comparison (PR #3565)

Image compare

• Remember the image compare splitter position (PR #3593)

Folder compare

• Preserve the sort order for columns that can be safely sorted while folder comparison is running. (#3579)(PR #3581)

Filter expressions

• Add the FilterExpression support required by the upcoming ApplyLineFilter plugin (PR #3530)

• BugFix: Fix case-insensitive contains in filter expressions (#3586)

Status bar

• Make merge mode indicator clickable and reduce its width (PR #3529)

Archive support

• BugFix: Fix issue #3588: Cannot compare folders inside zip files

• BugFix: [BUG] Comparing 7z-archives: file cannot be accessed by the system settings are restored. (#3633)

• Update 7-Zp to 26.03 (PR #3613)

Plugins

• BugFix: Fix off-by-one bug losing the last byte of pack/unpack plugin buffer output

• BugFix: Special UTF-8 characters not compared correctly (#3071)(PR #3568)

• Add plugin selection buttons to the status bar (PR #3518)

• Support adding plugins to pipelines from menus (PR #3523)

• Add filter expressions to plugin pipelines (PR #3540)

• Add MiniMax provider support to AI plugin (PR #3499)

• Add local LLM and custom OpenAI-compatible API support (PR #3589)

• Validate plugin pipeline filter expressions (PR #3578)

• SelectLines plugin: Add literal string matching with -F option. (#3500)(PR #3598)

Translations

• New translation:

  • Azerbaijani (PR #3624)
  • Indonesian (PR #3636)

• Translation updates:

  • Brazilian (PR #3526, PR #3528, PR #3536, PR #3538, PR #3558, PR #3571, PR #3592, PR #3605, PR #3618)
  • Chinese Simplified (PR #3531, PR #3542, PR #3554, PR #3572, PR #3595, PR #3604, PR #3619, PR #3637)
  • Chinese Traditional (PR #3642)
  • French (PR #3534, PR #3547, PR #3569, PR #3580, PR #3634)
  • German (PR #3524, PR #3541, PR #3555, PR #3576, PR #3597, PR #3603, PR #3612)
  • Hungarian (PR #3564, PR #3590)
  • Korean (PR #3548, PR #3563, PR #3621)
  • Italian (PR #3551, PR #3561, PR #3573, PR #3594, PR #3607, PR #3623)
  • Lithuanian (PR #3543, PR #3574, PR #3608, PR #3620)
  • Polish (PR #3527, PR #3549, PR #3556, PR #3577, PR #3616)
  • Spanish (PR #3614, PR #3615)
  • Russian (PR #3546, PR #3583, PR #3600, PR #3626)
  • Turkish (PR #3532, PR #3544, PR #3562, PR #3575, PR #3596, PR #3627)

Manual

• BugFix: [BUG] Spanish help is in French (#3658)

• Set localization parameters for French, Italian, and Spanish manuals (PR #3617)

Known issues

• Pressing OK in the Options window while the INI file specified by /inifile is open for comparison in WinMerge may corrupt the file. (#2685)
• Suggestion to make the result of image comparison more reliable (#1391)
• Crashes when comparing large files (#325)
• Very slow to compare significantly different directories (#322)
• Vertical scrollbar breaks after pasting text (#296)