Programmer’s Log Programmers Writing Stuff – Garry Bodsworth

Merging On The Mac

Because I'm a cheapskate even when someone else is paying I was trying to find some three-way merge tools for the Mac, unfortunately my Googling didn't turn up anything that doesn't appear on other platforms. Obviously you have things like ediff3 in emacs and erm....

One that I used extensively on Windows (also available for Linux) is KDiff3. It's a great graphical merge tool, and it works on the Mac. I followed the instructions to integrate it into Git (check out the useful post here) but I haven't had the mergetool successfully fire it up. When I load the files manually it seems to work fine. It'll require some more perseverance. KDiff3 is a great tool though and is a pleasure to use.

I decided to also look at Meld through MacPorts. Unfortunately it has to pull in half the universe like a gravity well, so it was still compiling the dependencies when I decided to call it a day. It looks like a good tool though with all the features you would want, but will no doubt need to run on the X11 platform. Also it is regularly updated which is a good sign. So if I can get it to work expect a post about that...

FileMerge built into the Mac is only a two way tool, and I did consider the Perform Merge Tool which is available for free. So I think I will persevere with the top two.