I was recently faced with working out what had changed in one of my big php files on the remote server (someone naughty had been playing with it). I use Mac OSX Dreamweaver and after a bit of searching around I found the following way to make Dreamweaver easily show you what has changed. This is not really anything major but it might save someone a bit of time.
First download and install TextWrangler. It is free and quite a nice text editing program.
Next open “Preferences” in Dreamweaver and select “File Compare”.
In “File Compare” browse to the “usr/bin/” folder and select “twdiff”.
Press OK and then go back to the main menu.
Open in Dreamweaver the local file in that you want to compare with the remote version. Select “Compare with Remote” from the “File” menu.
TextWrangler will now launch showing you the difference between the local version and the remote version. You can then chose to keep or reject any of the changes.
You don’t need Textwrangler for that, just install the developer tools from your OSX install DVD and tell Dreamweaver to use /usr/bin/opendiff which is the nicest interactive diff tool I’ve used, ever. It’s Filemerge, which is a port of some ancient X diff GUI.
And BTW, Textmate kicks Textwrangler’s butt. Hard. Its bundles for PHP and Ruby On Rails rock like Gibraltar, as does it’s SVN and git integration.
I guess it is always nice to have some alternative :) I will have to check out Textmate