Beyond Compare handles a wide variety of comparison tasks. It has specialized views for different kinds of files and different approaches to reconciling differences.
Each comparison task is called a Session. Sessions can be individualized, named and reused. Many of Beyond Compare's settings are managed and stored by session rather than as program-wide options, to give you greater flexibility. You can save different sessions with quite different settings, to accommodate differing tasks.
A Child Session is a file session that originated from a folder session.
Sessions can be opened in separate windows, or as multiple tabs on a single window. We refer to open sessions as Views. You can have multiple windows open, each with multiple tabs. You can drag a tab from one window to another, or right-click on a tab and pick Move Tab to New Window to move that tab onto its own window. (See Tab Options.)
You can save currently open sessions as a Workspace, and load them again later with the same configuration of windows and tabs. (See Managing Workspaces.)
The session settings that control how comparisons are performed are called Rules. Rules help you concentrate on important differences. Beyond Compare also maintains a list of File Formats to specify how various types of files are to be handled. You can modify the built-in file formats or create your own.
Credentials and other settings for remote services (FTP, WebDAV, Dropbox and others) are stored as named Profiles. (See Profile Management.)
This part of the documentation provides an overview of the various types of sessions and program concepts mentioned above.
See also