Git tips

I’ve not really got to grips with the behemoth of version control systems. So this page is kind of my survival tips for remembering how to do things I find useful but easily forget.

How to make git prefer changes made on your non-working branch

Sometimes I end up in the situation where I want to update my current working branch with changes (normally on origin/main) without having to go through the pain of resolving conflicts (because I know I want to accept everything from main).

The trick to this is

$ # Make sure everything is up to date first
$ git fetch
$ git pull
$ # Merge all changes from main
$ git pull -s recursive -X theirs origin main

The -s flag allows you to choose a merge strategy, in this case recursive.

Within recursive the -X flag allows you to choose options, in this case theirs prefers changes from the non-working branch.

This did the trick for me. One gotcha is that I’m used to the command:

$ git merge origin/main

So it caught me out that I needed a space instead of a forward slash.

Thank you to bric3 for this solution.
Official docs (so hard to read)

Conflict between VS Code’s “Merge Editor” and GitBash

I got so confused as to why VS Code kept crashing when I tried to fix conflicts. The issue is that I like to work with GitBash in Windows Terminal. Unfortunately it seems these two things conflict with each other. So the easy fix is:

Close the GitBash window in Windows Terminal before trying to resolve conflicts in VS Code

Easy.