Pro Vim

CHAPTER 18

Diffing

Regardless of whether you’re working with a Version Control System (such as Git/SVN/Mercurial) or not, being able to compare different versions of the same file can be very useful in the right circumstances.

For example, if you’re working in a programming environment, you’ll likely encounter an issue known as a “merge conflict,” when teaming with other programmers. This is when you have a repository of code, and you’ve forked the project to add feature A, while another team has forked the project to add feature B, and both features require modifying the same file (or set of files). The other team has managed to get their changes ...