Walkthroughs for the hosts listed on
Using Diffoniq from Other Programs. What these
have in common: they hand you real files, not extracted revisions, so
editing them is a legitimate part of the job — no read-only switch, and the
.BAK backup stays on, because here nothing else keeps a copy of
what you had before.
Close Total Commander and add this line to the [Configuration]
section of wincmd.ini (usually in
%APPDATA%\GHISLER):
CompareTool=C:\Program Files\Diffoniq\Diffoniq.exe
Two traps, both of which look like "the setting is
ignored": Total Commander rewrites wincmd.ini from memory when
it exits, so an edit made while it is running is lost — close it first. And there
must be only one CompareTool= line in the file.
Now mark two files and choose Files → Compare by Content. Because Diffoniq takes folders and archives just as well, the same command also gives you a full folder comparison from two marked directories, and an archive comparison from two marked ZIP files — Total Commander passes all three kinds of selection on to the external tool.
WinSCP's built-in Compare Files extension only offers a fixed list of tools, so set Diffoniq up as a custom command instead: Commands → Custom Commands → Add.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Description | Compare with Diffoniq |
| Custom command | "C:\Program Files\Diffoniq\Diffoniq.exe" "!^!" "!" |
| Command type | Local command |
| Use remote files | leave unchecked |
!^! stands for the local file and ! for the remote
one. Leaving Use remote files unchecked is what makes this work: WinSCP
then downloads the remote file into a temporary copy first and passes that,
instead of a path your local programs cannot open.
Select the local and the remote file, run the command, and the two sides are next to each other — the quickest way to answer "is what is actually on the server the same as what I have here?".
Editing the server side writes back. If you change the
remote side and save, WinSCP uploads the modified copy to the server. It asks
first — Overwrite remote file '…'? — but do not treat that as a safety
net: it is WinSCP's ordinary overwrite confirmation, it can be switched off in
its preferences, and a reflex Yes is given quickly. If you only ever want
to look, add --read-only to the command line above.
If the other side is reachable as a Windows share, you can leave the transfer client out of it altogether and hand Diffoniq both paths yourself:
"C:\Program Files\Diffoniq\Diffoniq.exe" "C:\site" "\\server\share\site"
That gives you a full folder comparison — including Synchronize — instead of one file at a time, and it works from the Explorer context menu, a shortcut or a scheduled task just as well. For a NAS or a file server this is usually the better route.
Diffoniq compares paths — a drive letter, a folder, a UNC share. It has no FTP, SFTP or cloud client of its own, and that is deliberate: the comparison engine is built for the speed of a local file system. Anything else has to be made to look like a file system first, and Windows has several ways to do that.
What does not work: the FTP sites you can open in File Explorer. They look like folders, but they are a shell namespace extension, not a file system — there is no path behind them that Diffoniq (or any other program's file dialog) could open.
What does work is a real mount. With rclone and WinFsp installed, one command turns a remote into a drive letter — this example is SFTP, and it is deliberately read-only:
set RCLONE_SFTP_HOST=server.example.com set RCLONE_SFTP_USER=jane set RCLONE_SFTP_KEY_FILE=C:\Users\Jane\.ssh\id_ed25519 rclone mount :sftp:/var/www X: --read-only --vfs-cache-mode minimal
Leave that window open — the drive exists as long as the command runs, and Ctrl+C ends it. Then compare as usual:
"C:\Program Files\Diffoniq\Diffoniq.exe" "C:\site" "X:\site"
rclone reaches S3, WebDAV, Dropbox, Google Drive and many other services the same way; for SFTP alone, sshfs-win is a lighter alternative, and a WebDAV server can be mapped with Windows' own Map network drive.
A mounted remote is not a local disk, and the comparison shows it. In our own
test (a small web tree of 277 entries over the open internet) the first scan of
the mounted side took 6.2 seconds against 0.5 milliseconds for the local
side — roughly 44 entries per second, because every directory costs a network
round trip. Repeating the same comparison took 4 milliseconds: rclone
caches directory listings (five minutes by default,
--dir-cache-time). So the first pass is the slow one, and a second
look right after is nearly free.
Leave the comparison on Date/Size over a mount. Comparing Contents means Diffoniq hashes every file, and hashing a mounted file pulls all of its bytes across the network. In the same test, five files of 30 KB took 4.4 seconds that way. The same applies to Re-verify Contents (Ctrl+F5). Date/Size is what you want here; use the content comparison on a local copy.
Two things that surprise people: a WinFsp drive is a normal path for
programs, but it does not appear as a volume in Disk Management or in
net use — do not go looking for it there. And on a Synology NAS,
SFTP is off by default: if rclone reports subsystem request failed,
enable SFTP in Control Panel → File Services. For a NAS that also
offers SMB, the UNC route above is simpler and much faster.