CALAMARI

About CALAMARI
CALAMARI is a primitive diff/merge tool for raster images. It is based on the idea of comparing the color value of each pixel in one or more images to the color value of a corresponding pixel in a counterpart image of equal dimensions.

A while back I gave a talk on integrating and merging that used simple raster images to represent files and diffs. The images made it easy to get the concepts across, but all of the merge results had to be mocked up by hand, making it impossible to demonstrate the examples with a real Perforce server. CALAMARI was written as a way of playing a bit more with this idea and making it easier to generate these types of examples, as well as opening the possibility of using them in a live demo. It is also very occasionally useful when working with images in Perforce.

Command line invocation
To use CALAMARI as a diff tool:

calamari IMAGE1 IMAGE2

To use CALAMARI as a merge tool:

calamari BASE THEIRS YOURS [RESULT]

The interface
For a complete description of each interface element, see the online help that's bundled with CALAMARI.

The following screenshot shows the merge tool mode being used to merge changes to an MS Paint drawing of a squid:



A step-by-step walkthrough of this example merge is given here.