The Fugue

A very important tool in the toolbox of any collaborating developer is a merge conflict resolution tool. OS X has the fantastic FileMerge, there are various graphical tools for linux like kdiff3, but I have yet to hear of one for the terminal. There’s vimdiff, but it is really not up to the task of merge conflict resolution (doesn’t handle 3-way diffs). There’s probably something in emacs, just because there’s always something for emacs. Emacs users please enlighten me, I’m not above using emacs for merge-conflict resolution. Might even be the gateway drug.

It doesn’t seem overly hard (at least, no harder than writing kdiff3 or FileMerge) to make an ncurses tool that will take a 3-way merge and let you efficiently choose A, B, or edit for each diff section. Can it really be that nobody has done it yet?

Dennis Muhlestein posted a quick ssh tip, and then a couple of really neat gems emerged in the comments. For the sake of those who didn’t click through, and my non-Utah readers, I repeat them here:

1. ssh-copy-id is a little utility to copy your public key to a remote server. Passwordless authentication has never been easier to set up!

   ssh-keygen -t rsa
ssh-copy-id $remote_host

2. ControlPath reuses the same connection for subsequent logins, so if you ssh into the same server from several terminals the logins after the first happen much faster. This is a really neat trick.

   # in ~/.ssh/config
Host *
ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/master-%r@%h:%p