Thanks for the interesting article. Some disadvantages I think of WinMerge when resolving merge conflicts, is that it does not indicate which changes are conflicting. Also you cannot skip to the next conflicting change, you can only go to the next change. So if there are many changes between source and target, and only one is conflicting, it is very difficult to see which one it is.
One question: in WinMerge, how do you resolve a merge conflict? The built-in Visual Studio merge tool has commands for accepting the source or target version of a conflicting change (or both), or you can enter your own version into the bottom pane. E.g., I had a merge conflict where there were 3 differences between source and target, and the first difference was conflicting. In fact I just wanted the target version of the file, and didn’t need any of the changes from the source. So I exited WinMerge without changing anything. VS saw this as abandoning the conflict resolution. The VS merge tool has much better integration with the merge process, but it has a critical weakness in not being able to ignore white space differences. With WinMerge you can ignore all white space differences, but it does integrate so well with the VS merge conflict resolution.
In response to: Setting up WinMerge as the Visual Studio Merge and Diff-tool
Adrian [Visitor]
Thanks for the interesting article. Some disadvantages I think of WinMerge when resolving merge conflicts, is that it does not indicate which changes are conflicting. Also you cannot skip to the next conflicting change, you can only go to the next change. So if there are many changes between source and target, and only one is conflicting, it is very difficult to see which one it is.
One question: in WinMerge, how do you resolve a merge conflict? The built-in Visual Studio merge tool has commands for accepting the source or target version of a conflicting change (or both), or you can enter your own version into the bottom pane. E.g., I had a merge conflict where there were 3 differences between source and target, and the first difference was conflicting. In fact I just wanted the target version of the file, and didn’t need any of the changes from the source. So I exited WinMerge without changing anything. VS saw this as abandoning the conflict resolution. The VS merge tool has much better integration with the merge process, but it has a critical weakness in not being able to ignore white space differences. With WinMerge you can ignore all white space differences, but it does integrate so well with the VS merge conflict resolution.