- Make sure IntelliJ IDEA is running.
- On the main menu, choose
Tools
>Create Command-line Launcher
. The dialog box Create Launcher Script opens, with the suggested path and name of the launcher script. You can accept default, or specify your own path. - Make notice of it, as you'll need it later. Outside of IntelliJ IDEA, add the path and name of the launcher script to your path.
- Specify the location of the IntelliJ IDEA executable in the Path system environment variable. In this case, you will be able to invoke the IntelliJ IDEA executable and other IntelliJ IDEA commands from any directory.
For more information, visit https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/running-intellij-idea-as-a-diff-or-merge-command-line-tool.html
- In windows 10, if you face some warning like “Could not open/create prefs root node …” Ref: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16428098/groovy-shell-warning-could-not-open-create-prefs-root-node Thanks to @SanthoshDhandapani for this.
This setup worked fine for me on a Mac. Assuming you've already run the create command line launcher step. What doesn't make a lot of sense to me though is why IntelliJ has to already be running. Any context for that? I have the same issue. The reason I find it odd is that if you compare two files directly on the filesystem it works fine without IntelliJ already running.
idea diff localfile.txt localfile2.txt