Mergiraf: Syntax-Aware Merging for Git

(lwn.net)

61 points | by Velocifyer 10 days ago ago

11 comments

  • mentalgear 38 minutes ago

    - Related in fine-grained diffing approach: Git heatmap: diff viewer for code reviews

    > Heatmap color-codes every diff line/token by how much human attention it probably needs. Unlike PR-review bots, we try to flag not just by “is it a bug?” but by “is it worth a second look?” (examples: hard-coded secret, weird crypto mode, gnarly logic).

    https://0github.com/

    • Valodim 14 minutes ago

      The idea is cool but boy does it make you blind to anything the AI doesn't deem noteworthy. Comes down to whether you trust a human reviewer more, or the LLM

  • paulirish 30 minutes ago

    Have been using Mergiraf for the past 4 months. It's automatically solved about 70% of my conflicts and, luckily, I've never contested any of them. Pretty pleased.

  • pavelai 10 days ago

    Very impressive enhancement. Not a panacea though. It uses tree-sitter approach to solve situations when two users change the same line of code. For example one change function name and other adds a new argument. It will merge it without conflicts. It still has some troubles to solve complex issues, without knowing author intensions. But can significantly simplify developers' lives. Not sure if it would land into git very soon. It requires all git to know all the parsers you need. But definitely worth adding.

    • Velocifyer 10 days ago

      This is a seprate tool that one can tell git to use.

  • Valodim an hour ago

    fyi, comes configured in jj by default. Just `jj resolve --tool mergiraf` and some conflicts go away :)

  • jayd16 2 hours ago

    I wish there were a lot more syntax aware merges built into git (et al). Why are separate columns on the same row of a CSV or multiple appends to a list (in any language you don't want a trailing comma) so annoying to merge?

    It could be so much better.

  • mnemonet 4 hours ago

    This is a very interesting idea that could save a lot of time and pain in big projects.

    The example shown reminds me pf Zed's CRDTs [1], and their journey to build a fine-grained version control system for agentic development [2]—I imagine this work could prove useful to the Zed/Cursor team, and likely shares a lot of functionality with DeltaDB [2].

    - [1]: https://zed.dev/blog/crdts

    - [2]: https://zed.dev/blog/sequoia-backs-zed

    • vinnyhaps 3 hours ago

      I’m pretty sure one of the Zed founders wrote tree-sitter, so I’m sure there’s some overlap

      It’s really cool to see tree-sitter unlock so many of these use cases. I love using [difftastic] for my diffing tool to get context aware diffs. So in the example from the article, the diff would highlight the `void` and `int` changes with a heavier background of red and green respectively

      [difftastic]: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

  • sysguest an hour ago

    finally...

    I've been using 1-arg-1-line to avoid most conflicts

  • ltbarcly3 2 hours ago

    claude "resolve merge conflicts"