File filters let you exclude files and folders from comparison, copy and delete actions. Filters are defined globally and apply to all sessions; each session can override them with its own set.

Opening File Filters

Click the filter icon in the folder view toolbar to open the Session Preferences dialog on the File Filters tab.

How Filters Work

The panel shows the list of active rules and a logic operator that controls how they are combined.

• Any — a file is excluded if at least one rule matches (logical OR)
• All — a file is excluded only if all rules match (logical AND)

Use the + button at the end of a rule row to add a new rule below it, and the − button to remove it.

Example — exclude only large log files

Goal: exclude files that are both named *.log and larger than 10 MB. You do not want to exclude all .log files, and you do not want to exclude all large files.

Set the operator to All, then add two rules:

1. Name (Ignore Case) is like *.log
2. File Size is greater than 10 MB

With All, a file must satisfy every rule to be excluded. Only .log files larger than 10 MB are filtered out. If you used Any, the filter would exclude any file whose name ends in .log plus any file larger than 10 MB — a much broader exclusion.

Each rule is made up of three parts: a category, a comparator, and a value.

Default Filters

The factory-default filters exclude version control directories and common system junk files. See the Comparison Method page for the full list of excluded items (.DS_Store, .git, .svn, .hg, .bzr, CVS, and backup files matching *~).

These rules are combined with Any (logical OR), so a file or folder is excluded if its name matches any one of them.

Filter Categories

Name Filters

Available for categories Name (case-sensitive) and Name (Ignore Case) (case-insensitive).

is like uses glob-style patterns, not regular expressions. The . character has no special meaning — it matches a literal dot.

To match hidden files on macOS (names starting with a dot), use the pattern .* with Name (Ignore Case) is like.

Path Filters

Available for categories Path (case-sensitive) and Path (Ignore Case) (case-insensitive).
The value is a path relative to the comparison root.

Example

Left root path: /Users/dave/sources/

/Users/dave/sources/
  project_1
    src/
  project_2
    src/
    index.txt

To exclude only the src folder under project_1, set the path filter value to project_1/src.
The path is relative to the root /Users/dave/sources/; both folders and files are accepted as path values.
Right-click any file or folder in the folder comparison view and choose Exclude from the context menu. VisualDiffer automatically adds a Path ends with <relative-path> rule for the selected item to the current session’s filters.

Be careful not to add extra characters; the following paths will never match:
project_1//src   invalid, double slash
project_1/src/   invalid, trailing slash

File Size Filters

Available for category File Size. Applies to files only, not folders.
Specify the size value and select the unit (Bytes, KB, MB, GB).

File Modification Date Filters

Available for category File Modification Date. Applies to files only, not folders.

Show Filtered Files

By default, files and folders that match the active filters are hidden from the folder comparison view. You can make them visible without removing the filters:

• Via the View menu — choose Show Filtered Files to display them. The menu item toggles to Hide Filtered Files when they are visible.
• Via the scope bar — the Filtered segment at the right end of the scope bar shows or hides filtered items without opening any menu.

When filtered items are shown, they appear with a distinct visual style so you can tell them apart from normal comparison results, as shown in the figure below.

Filtered files are skipped during copy and delete operations even when they are visible. To include them by default, enable Include Filtered Items By Default in Confirmations Preferences.

Managing Filter Sets

The ⊙ button in the top-right corner of the panel opens a menu to manage filter configurations.

How session filters and global defaults relate:

Each open session keeps its own copy of the filter rules. Changes you make in the Session Preferences dialog affect only the current session. The ⊙ menu lets you synchronise between the session and the application-wide default:

• Set Current as Defaults — saves the current session’s filters as the new global default, applied to every future new session.
• Fill with Defaults — replaces the current session’s filters with the global default, discarding any local changes.
• Restore Factory Defaults — clears the global default and reverts to the original factory filters (see Default Filters).

Folder Traversal

By default, folders matching the active filters are still traversed during comparison — they are hidden from the view but their contents are read.

The option Traverse the folders that match the ‘File Filters’ in the Comparison tab controls this behaviour.

When this option is disabled, folders matching the filters are not traversed at all. This makes the scan faster, but those folders will appear empty in the view even if they contain files.

Example — completely skip build output directories

If your project has large build/ or DerivedData/ folders you never need to compare, you can exclude them and skip reading their contents entirely:

1. Open the Session Preferences File Filters tab.
2. Add a rule: Name is build (add a second rule Name is DerivedData if needed, with operator set to Any)
3. Switch to the Comparison tab.
4. Disable the option Traverse the folders that match the ‘File Filters’.

With traversal disabled, VisualDiffer does not read the contents of matching folders at all. The scan is significantly faster on large trees.

With traversal enabled (the default), filtered folders are hidden from the view but their contents are still read. This is useful when you want to hide a folder from the comparison results but still allow copy or delete actions on files inside it.