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Your title mentions "Linux console" but your question mentions meld, which is a GUI application. It might help answerers if you could clarify this.
In GUI apps, meld is still pretty much the standard. It works well, it's reasonably pretty and intuitive.
If you're really limited to using the console (i.e. text-only) then apart from the diff utilities built into editors like vim and emacs you could also try the original command line utility diff. I find it very useful to use the -y option to display files side-by-side, and there are other options I've used to display "unified" diffs and to precisely set the amount of context around matched differences. If you pipe diff's output into less you can browse with fair convenience.