Re: Making git as easy as CVS, for handling merge conflicts

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

On November 11, 2019 9:45:44 AM GMT, "João Távora" <joaotavora@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 3:04 AM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> > [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider   
> ]]]
> > [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,    
> ]]]
> > [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.
> ]]]
> >
> > Talking about my problems using git via Emacs and VC.  When I tried
> > this, a few years ago, something gave me three side-by-side windows
> > and I had no idea what to do with them, so I had to bail out.
> >
> >   > Maybe, it was ediff-mode?
> >
> > What does Ediff mode do?  Does it make three windows
> > side by side?
> 
> Ediff is an interactive Emacs interface to the classic diff algorithm,
> where instead of seeing +'s and -'s, you see the two versions
> that differ, one in each window.  You can copy hunks from one
> version to the other interactive.
> 
> I think that ediff3, or ediff-files3, is an Emacs interface to the
> diff3
> algorithm, which I know does the same for three versions, but,
> perhaps much like you, it confuses me a lot.  Some people do
> prefer to handle merge conflicts with it.
> 
> I handle Git merge conflicts using smerge-mode.  In that mode,
> no new windows are created, but you see annotated and
> highlighted portions for each conflicting part in the file. For each
> little conflict region, you can click to decide which of the two
> versions to keep or manually merge the two into one.
> 
> smerge-mode is automatically activated when you C-x C-f a
> file with freshly produced merge conflicts.
> 
> João

The context of this will be better understood if you first read the related duscussion on gnu-system-discuss, where it started.  RMS described there something that happened to him dyring resolution of Git conflicts.