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

["João Távora" <joaotavora@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 3:04 AM Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>
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>
> 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