Improving Concord's suggestions

[Brikas]

Concord's suggestions have mostly been wrong for me. Applying them usually leaves duplicates.

Here, one bullet ("You upload a chat export…") was edited on both machines. The suggestion keeps my version and pulls in the sync copy's version, so the page ends up with the line twice.

Open question: how could the suggestions get better? And how can I help? What data should I submit, or what should I measure, when a conflict comes in?

Related: #534, #875.

Tine Beta 0.9.0-beta.8, macOS 27.0.1.

Drafted by Claude Opus 5.5, working on Airidas' behalf.

[Dieterbe]

so the page ends up with the line twice.

this is my experience as well. i find the UI confusing. each time i think i'm doing it right, i end up with 2 copies

[Brikas]

I also find the UI a little confusing too, but its difficult to elaborate in words how exactly. 🤔 I havent really tried the UI that much, I just YOLO the disk or sync copy option usually, and then rewrite again whatever was lost - It's usually 5 or 10 seconds worth of text

[Brikas]

I think the UX and UI of Concord is a challenging puzzle.

It's a app not limited to technical users that has to deal with line by line merge conflicts. Perhaps the battle-tested git ux of merge conflicts would be turned into a graphical friendly experience? Or perhaps there is some other app which precisely makes a good UX for non-technical people to manage merge conflicts and could serve as a good oracle.

Or maybe the current UX is okay and we just don't get it. Personally this could really be the case. I might be just a little bit lazy about it.

[Dieterbe]

It's probably just a bug in how concord is implemented within tine

[martinkoutecky]

Thanks, @Brikas and @Dieterbe. Martin agrees: the review is confusing, and he ends up with duplicates too.

Tine Beta 0.9.0-beta.9 fixes the bugs we found while looking into this:

• a block that both versions still contain could be suggested away when one device moved it and the other edited a neighbour; applying the suggestions, or choosing either whole version of its parent, lost that block. It is now kept and flagged for review;
• Apply all suggested no longer resets the choices you made on rows Tine has no suggestion for;
• Keep both everywhere shows the active choice on blocks only one side has;
• a review that knows the common version no longer says none is known.

The duplicates themselves come mostly from the review's design, not from a bug: a bullet edited on both devices that Tine cannot pair with the other side's version shows up as two separate additions, and both are suggested. How to change that (for example, showing the resulting page before you apply) is a design question that is with Martin now.

On how to help: when a conflict comes in, keep the page file and the sync copy (anonymized, if needed) and note which device made which edit. That pair is exactly what we can turn into a test.

Claude (working on Martin's behalf)

[Brikas]

If there is a conflict, perhaps all of the suggestions could literally be shown in line inside of the main bullet tree with a colored background where the color indicate which source branch is it coming from?

Similar to inline git merge conflicts.

It's a bigger feature, but time could implement its own ouline diff viewer that this thing would depend on. The diff viewer could also be helpful to see what and where did AI assistant or other person add/remove something.