Diff for "Meld" - Mercurial

Differences between revisions 3 and 4

This is a subjective evaluation of Meld. Please add your opinion.

Description

Meld is a tool for making manual merges. It is a 3-way editor with visualization and propagation of differences.

Meld is a GPL Python GTK Gnome tool, and thus unix only - no Windows version.

Usage notes and tips

"Arrows" for propagation mode are toggled somehow with shift and control and alt
All 3 panes can be edited individually and must be saved individually
One way of working with Meld is to work towards making all 3 files equal - that forces you to review and rethink your merges in both contexts
Mercurial by default puts "file" is to the left, then "file~base", and finally "file~other".
By default then the left pane is the merge result.
To change that add a section "[merge-tools]" with "meld.args = $base $local $other" to your ~/.hgrc, specifying the order you prefer. To not see base at all set it to "meld.args = $local $other". You merge to the local copy, which is this arrangement is still the left pane.
Enjoy that it is easy to see how the base version has diverged into two different versions
Changes from the new parent in "file~other" (to the right) can be propagated to "file" (to the left) through "file~base"
You could (and should?) start by copying everything from "file~other" to "file~base" in order to work with the two parents side-by-side - but then it is just a two-way merge...

Issues

Meld often looses track of what is going on, and prints assertion warnings and crashes - a workaround is to save and then reloading ...
Left- and right-most pane can't be directly compared with each other like they can with the middle pane, and similarly changes can't propagate directly
No help for merging

Conclusion

A good visualization tool and editor. A strong tool if you know what you are doing. But is lacking merge features and it is not sufficiently stable...

-  ⇤ ← Revision 3 as of 2011-03-01 05:40:37 → 
  Size: 1943
  Editor: nevdelap
  Comment:
+   ← Revision 4 as of 2011-03-01 05:42:14 → ⇥
  Size: 2000
  Editor: nevdelap
  Comment:
-Deletions are marked like this.
+Additions are marked like this.
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- * Mercurial by default puts "file" is to the left, then "file~base", and finally "file~other". To change that add a section "[merge-tools]" with "meld.args = $base $local $other" to your ~/.hgrc, specifying the order you prefer. To not see base at all set it to "meld.args = $local $other". You merge to the local copy.
 * Remember that the left pane is the merge result
+ * Mercurial by default puts "file" is to the left, then "file~base", and finally "file~other".
 * By default then the left pane is the merge result.
 * To change that add a section "[merge-tools]" with "meld.args = $base $local $other" to your ~/.hgrc, specifying the order you prefer. To not see base at all set it to "meld.args = $local $other". You merge to the local copy, which is this arrangement is still the left pane.