I'm one of those folks who will tell people to give the official CLI frontend of git a chance and to try and stick to it. I can assure you it is not out of elitism, but experience. I've tried the many third party GUI frontends, and always got myself into bigger trouble down the line in the end, nor did they bring any of the revelatory boosts in insight they claimed they would. And of course, they're all a little different from one another, so migrating between them is an additional chore.
Then of course it's possible I didn't give the many GUI frontends enough of a chance. Such is life, it's a resource limited game. Principally, I justify my position with the argument that the many GUIs will try to translate git into something visual by adding their own designs, and this can prove additionally misleading and difficult, if git wasn't rough enough already.
The only GUI bits I use for git are editor integrations such as the official one in VS Code, and only when I know it's adequate. Which you can only know if you know what's going on in the background.
GUI is absolutely easier for merge conflicts. I use the one that comes on jetbrain ides which is awesome.
This isn't even opinion. It's fact. Anyone who has experience regularly(keyword) using both CLI and GUI for merge conflicts will side with me on this by an overwhelming majority such that I might as well call this fact.
I honestly don't mean to insult you but when you say things like this in a discussion where others obviously disagree with you, it makes you seem like either an overly enthusiastic beginner that hasn't learnt about tradeoffs yet, or a very stupid fanatic. You might be neither, but that is how it comes across.
>Anyone who has experience regularly(keyword) using both CLI and GUI for merge conflicts will side with me on this
I and many others simply disagree with you. I have used those tools. They work okay in simple cases but break down in more complex ones. That is my opinion.
I am sure you indeed do successfully use JetBrains to merge "the most massive conflicts". Good on you. I'm glad it works for you.
The mere fact you've even typed out the words "Anyone who has experience regularly(keyword) using both CLI and GUI for merge conflicts will side with me on this" makes you look like a child. This is how children speak.
>You probably worked with a trashy gui and likely didn’t use it too much.
You don't seem to be able to encounter someone that disagrees with you without immediately assuming they must be doing something wrong, lack experience, or be stupid.
Again, how hard is it to accept that people have different preferences? You are like those people on forums in the 2000s that argued that anyone that liked Ruby/Python was an idiot and obviously Python/Ruby was the far superior language. Anyone that disagreed obviously had never used Python/Ruby properly, and was obviously just a fanatic. I thought we moved past that stupid shit years ago.
> You don't seem to be able to encounter someone that disagrees with you without immediately assuming they must be doing something wrong, lack experience, or be stupid.
Yes. Not stupid though. More lack of experience. That’s my opinion about it and in my opinion the gui is better and that is a fact.
What I don’t understand is why my opinion about something as a fact no matter how extreme leads to you openly calling me a stupid fanatic and calling me a child?
I said you come off as stupider earlier with the additional statement of “not to be insulting”. I also said it to sort of illustrate to you and imitate you on what happens when you call someone stupid and then say the words “I don’t mean to be insulting” as if that negates what is in actuality an insult. It doesn’t and now you’ve openly called me a child. This ends here. Good day.
The community seems to disagree so far. I'll take a look at how it works tomorrow though. For me most of the misery around merge conflict resolution stems from how git fundamentally works, so I'm not sure how much it can possibly improve on it.
The only people who disagree are people who don't have regular experience from both sides.
Graphical diffs that automatically handle merge conflicts visually with clicks to insert, undo and the ability for custom modification are MUCH MUCH more convenient with a GUI. Highly recommend the jetbrains conflict resolver gui.
I can assure you ANYONE who regularly has experience with both the CLI and that GUI(jetbrains) will hands down say the GUI is superior for merge conflicts. It is NOT intrinsic to the nature of merge conflicts. Any disagreement in this area stems from lack of experience or knowledge.
If anyone has experience with both and they have a contrary opinion, feel free to tell me. I doubt such a person exists though.
I find ediff from Emacs to be superior to the JetBrains conflict resolution view. And I've had to deal with some gnarly (and large) merges at $JOB.
I dunno, something about its keyboard-driven design (and in general being Emacs-based) makes it clearer in usage than the JetBrains offering. Although this is probably what one is used to.
Of course, the really important thing is that people set merge.conflictStyle = zdiff3. Maybe a bit opinionated, but it really makes proper merging a lot easier.
Ediff is still a GUI (yes, even if you're running emacs -nw).
I also thing Ediff has some very annoying behaviors - the fact that it doesn't use intuitive names for the two buffers (especially because of Git's annoying nomenclature when rebasing vs merging), and the fact that there's no shortcut for inserting both the A and the B changes into the destination, which is a common operation.
I haven't really used the JetBrains merge UI, so I don't know if it's better or worse, but I don't think it's very hard to improve over ediff.
> Ediff is still a GUI (yes, even if you're running emacs -nw).
I'd dispute this, and more likely call it a TUI[0], unless of course one wants to go with the really pedantic point that all text is graphical.
It certainly isn't what I would associate with the words GUI merge editor, which feels to me more like what Sublime Merge for example does
> I also thing Ediff has some very annoying behaviors - the fact that it doesn't use intuitive names for the two buffers (especially because of Git's annoying nomenclature when rebasing vs merging), and the fact that there's no shortcut for inserting both the A and the B changes into the destination, which is a common operation.
Yeah, A, B, and C (and when doing the (z)diff3 thing, Ancestor) are certainly not the most intuitive names for the respective buggers (ours, theirs, result, and base in more Git-ish nomenclature) but it gets clear enough with practice. Not really a defence for bad UI, but eh, computer science is certainly known for that.
As for the "keep both" operation, yeah, that's lacking in ediff. There is one in SMerge mode (C-c ^ a) which of course activates when the buffer has any valid conflict markers, but at least in three-way merges, it also keeps the ancestor which is not usually what one wants.
Although at least when I was doing a lot of conflict resolution, a lot of the times it made sense to merge things by hand anyhow (it was a bunch of mega-merges related to a technology upgrade which had been half abandoned due to lack of time/focus from higher-ups), but I agree that the lack of "keep both" is problematic. Should probably file a bug report.
> I haven't really used the JetBrains merge UI, so I don't know if it's better or worse, but I don't think it's very hard to improve over ediff.
Probably not, but it also shouldn't be too difficult to improve on ediff either. And well, I at least like it better than the JetBrains resolution view or whatever VSCode has
I've seen another gui waaay back before git was popular. Perforce actually handled merge conflicts with a GUI just as good. I think it's still just as good, though almost no one uses it.
It works with git??? I had no idea. I highly recommend anyone reading this to try out P4merge as the merge conflict resolver for git. It might be the better alternative to jetbrains as jetbrains usually involves buying into using the entire editor.
> Graphical diffs that automatically handle merge conflicts visually with clicks to insert, undo and the ability for custom modification are MUCH MUCH more convenient with a GUI
Not saying you are wrong, I used to only use VSC Gui for merge conflicts. Then at some point learned to edit myself and just use the CLI. After many many years I tried lazygit (TUI) for merge conflicts while still being in the terminal and I don’t think I can go back to do it manually anymore.
This is basically my workflow too. I use git from the command line until I need to resolve a merge conflict, then I hop into vscode to resolve the conflicting file.
Then of course it's possible I didn't give the many GUI frontends enough of a chance. Such is life, it's a resource limited game. Principally, I justify my position with the argument that the many GUIs will try to translate git into something visual by adding their own designs, and this can prove additionally misleading and difficult, if git wasn't rough enough already.
The only GUI bits I use for git are editor integrations such as the official one in VS Code, and only when I know it's adequate. Which you can only know if you know what's going on in the background.