Improve Three Way Merge GUI

[tajmone]

The three-way merging system for solving conflicts in SM could be improved in terms of visual clues of what is being merged from where (i.e. the left pane or the right one).

There are triangles at the beginning of the lines/blocks which can be merged/removed, but these don't change color to indicate is that line/block is currently being merged-into the central pane or not.

If the triangles could have a grey color to indicate that the line/block is not being used/merged, and a green color when it is, it would be much easier to track how multiple conflicts are being handled.

Today I had to handle three way merge with many conflicts and I had trouble spotting from which side the edits were being merged when revising the whole file.

PS: I usually handled 3-way merging with BeyondCompare 4 in the past, which has a GUI that is very intuitive visually when it comes to spotting where the merged text in the central panel is coming from and if manual editing was done.

Probably it's just something that boils down to color clues, but also text wrapping.

[Drunk-Creator]

I had done some research about BeyondCompare as the author mentioned about it. It appears that most three way merges are following a 2-by-1 layout which makes it easier to see the end result (i.e., VSCode).

Perhaps an option to allow users to switch layouts would be great, so that users that are already comfortable with the current layout can remain and those who prefer a new layout could switch.

Source: https://dev.to/vscodetips/vs-code-tip-of-the-week-3-way-merge-editor-416h

Source: https://beyondcompare.gitbook.io/project/git/untitled