Making your Git Diff/Merge More Useful

OK, it is understood that you should try to keep your commits small in git, as well as other content versioning systems, but sometimes, you have to refactor or have a branch that won’t die.  Unfortunately, the merge process gets really painful.  Depending on what you are merging, this can sometimes be made much easier.  For example, if you are coding, the default line-by-line compare kinda sucks.  So I did a bit of research with my buddy,  David Souther, to find out how to make this better.

Patience algorithm

The first algorithm is called the patience algorithm, which is documented visually here.  It’s basically searching for matching full lines to find points that haven’t changed.  This is useful, because if you are programming an API, this is likely to change less frequently than the code inside the API.

###Histogram Algorithm This is the one that jgit uses by default.  Eclipse, in turn uses the egit plugin, which uses jgit under the hood.  So basically, Eclipse uses this by default.  I attempt to stay out of the IDE as much as possible these days though, so I’d rather this be run on the command line.

Myers Algorithm

There is also a third, only sometimes useful one called Myers algorithm, which is a basic greedy algorithm.  It can sometimes be useful when you know that your code is in large runs in particular section.  More info  here.

Testing it out

To test these out, anyone can do the following to see the default compare of a file and the last change in its history:

git diff HEAD HEAD^ example.file

versus the following, which will run the patience algorithm:

git diff --patience HEAD HEAD^ example.file

Keeping the Change

You get the general idea.  Just adjust the algorithm with the “–histogram” or “–myers” flags.  If you want to keep a particular one, run “git config –global diff.algorithm patience”, which will save this as your default git diff algorithm.