Tonight's tip comes courtesy of Ty Landercasper, Jean-Sebastien Leroy, and Pavel Nedev who have designed the Compare Plug-in for NotePad ++. The Compare plug-in allows you to detect if there any differences in the displayable characters of two different text files.

NotePad ++ has a Plugins menu from which a separate Plugin Manager can be installed. Do this and then follow the prompt to restart NotePad ++.

Open two text files that you want to compare. Go back to the Plugin menu and simply select Compare . . . Compare.

NotePad ++ will show the two files side by side and highlight differences in red. You can move between the discrepancies by clicking on the blue arrows on the right of the tool bar.