I trialed several popular third-party diff tools and settled on Meld for our team.
I set out to standardize our tooling for diffing and merging code on our git repos so that everyone has the same experience when visualizing code differences, regardless of IDE or operating system. Our novice developers especially had a hard time because the senior developers could only scratch their heads and say, 'well, it works for me!'Įventually this became enough of a problem that we had to address it. Developers also have their own versions of Visual Studio with their own configurations, or may not use Visual Studio at all. Some of these issues stem from the fact that a lot of our source code runs on Unix-like systems which can introduce differences in line endings or text encoding. This is a problem which is all-too-familiar for developers using Windows. Developer A has a problem with a particular merge conflict, but Developer B is not able to reproduce the same. Seemingly identical files show huge blocks of differences in Visual Studio's merge tool.
Developers have reported alarming problems like code disappearing or duplicating. Recently, my team has been running into issues with our git merges in Visual Studio. Click here to skip to the setup instructions.
