How to resolve merge conflicts in vim

Introduction

vim is definitely the best (IMHO) editor for editing any kind of text on the computer and git for maintaining versions. While working with git it is quite often the case that conflicts happen while merging or rebasing branches, but unfortunately I did not get any convenient way to resolve the conflicts. In situations like these, I used to resort to vscode which had a great intuitive way of doing the same. Here, I'm glad to say that I've finally achieved vscode level of intuitiveness and comfort, in vim <3. Follow along to know-how.

Goal

Resolve the conflict arising out of merging two branches of git in vim.

Steps

Once you have merged the branches, you can do :Gstatus inside vim to see the status of the files.

1. Hit enter on the file whose conflicts you want to resolve.
2. The above step will open the file in a new buffer.
3. Go to the buffer in which the conflicted file is open then do :Gvdiffsplit to open the file in three-way split as shown below.

The left split is called the target branch, it is the current state of the file when we tried merging i.e current changes. The middle one is the working copy, where the resolved final state is captured. The rightmost split called the merge branch, it has the changes from the branch being merged to the branch we are on i.e the incoming changes.
4. You can move to the next conflict using]c and the previous conflict using [c.
5. On each conflict you need to decide which changes you want, either you can accept changes from the targetbranch by doing :diffget //2 or you can accept changes from merge branch by doing :diffget //3, all from the working split. You can also you :diffput but I prefer :diffget.
6. If the syntax highlighting does not change even after resolving a conflict, you can use:diffupdate to update the working copy. It is good to do :diffupdate after resolving conflicts.
7. If you want both changes, the best option seems to be manually copying from target and merge splits.
8. You can also use:Gwrite on either the target or the merge split you want that change entirely.
9. Once all conflicts are resolved, you can do:only from the split you want to keep and leave the vimdiff mode.

Conclusion

After having resolved the conflicts, you should do git merge --continue after staging your changes by doing git add <files>.
There are multiple ways you can go about resolving conflicts, let me you how you are doing it, in vim ;)
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Originally published at http://souvikhaldar.info on September 28, 2020.