git-imerge VS difftastic

Afaik, there's currently no official way to pause/stash a rebase/merge-in-progress. (There is git-imerge which supports incremental merges/rebases (basically split a big merge into smaller ones), but I never used it and think you'll need to use it from the start of a merge/rebase.)

Try git imerge.

If the merge is large in the number of commits involved git imerge may be useful to you. It breaks down one big merge into many smaller merges, essentially merging one new commit from each branch, one at a time. The advantage being that you only ever need to consider the conflict between two individual commits at a time.

The repo for it is https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge and the blog post / instructions is at https://wilsonmar.github.io/git-imerge/

Similar ideas have been discussed before in Git, but I don't think anyone has acted on them much. Michael Haggerty's git-imerge tries to make conflicts shareable, but I think it was more of a side-effect of the original goal of optimizing rebase/merge and auto-reducing conflicts to their minimal representation. I'm very curious how conflicts are represented in Jujutsu so I can better understand this power. I'm curious about how conflicts in conflict-resolution commits are handled and other such magic.

That gist seems like a simplified version of https://github.com/mhagger/git-imerge, so check that out if you haven't. (I haven't looked at git-imerge in a long time, so I should read about it again myself.)

i want a diff tool that shows me exactly which tokens have changed, and which haven't, regardless of how they are laid out.

These already exist: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

when we get that, then we should get even less merge conflicts.

Counterintuitively, that is not the case. AST-merge is a much, much, much, much, much harder problem than AST-diff.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic?tab=readme-ov-file#can...

The fact that diffs can be used to drive a 3-way merge is in fact an accidental property that arises due to the sheer crudeness of the diff format. As soon as you start using more-sophisticated diff formats, solutions to "the diff problem" no longer lead directly to solutions to "the merge problem".

Yes there is an `—-override` option you can use to specify the language in which a file should be parsed.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/blob/master/CHANGELOG....

Use the fantastic difftastic instead of git's diff. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

  [alias]

difftastic provides similar capabilities in a free tool based on treesitter

difftastic? https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

If you're looking for a VS Code extension or a GitHub app, check out https://semanticdiff.com/. I'm a co-founder of this project.

If you prefer a CLI tool, check out https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic. It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances"). So it will show some changes (e.g. replacing a character in a string with an escape sequence) even though they are technically equivalent.

Shameless plug: I've written difftastic[1], a tool that builds ASTs and then does a structural diff of them. You can use it with git too.

It's an incredibly hard problem though, both from a computational complexity point of view, and trying to build a comprehensible UI once you've done the structural AST diff.

[1]: https://github.com/wilfred/difftastic

There is a diff tool called difftastic: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

The idea is that it does not show diff based on text change, but on syntastic meaning. For that, it uses tree-sitter.

I think it still shows the trailing comma in the situation as shown in the article, but it's quite different experience than the standard text based diff.