

There’s never a brief moment of panic when you forget to turn on track changes in Word before you start editing a document, because track changes isn’t necessary.

Comparisons generally aren’t even created as separate files (again and again and again, as a document changes). Comparisons aren’t exchanged as separate files, because everyone (rightly) expects everyone else to be able to generate diffs on their own.
BLEND TWO WORD DOCUMENTS WORD FOR MAC 2017 SOFTWARE
The working processes that these applications enable in software development are very different from typical working processes in legal services. Tower, SourceTree, and similar apps also usually offer basic editing tools: for example, you can revert selected changes if you change your mind, or push only some changes to your source code repository and worry about other changes later. (The text in these examples is from the Wikipedia article on the diff utility.) What this looks like in practice is a diff (similar to a redline) shown within a version control application.

There’s no “ track changes,” and you don’t “run a redline.” Instead, comparisons are essentially already done, all the time. In software development, comparing one version of a file to another generally is not a separate step in a working process. Like lawyers, software developers routinely compare different versions of text (source code, not legal documents) as they work-but the way software developers typically go about this is very different, and arguably better, than the way lawyers typically go about this. When you work with text, as you certainly do in law, you often need to be able to compare one text to another easily and quickly.
