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Add to SafariWhen comparing Magit vs Kdiff3, the Slant community recommends Kdiff3 for most people. In the question“What are the best merge applications for Git?” Kdiff3 is ranked 3rd while Magit is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Kdiff3 is:
For modern version control systems, 3way merge support is a basic requirement, but many other open source diff viewers do not adequately handle 3way merges.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Uninterrupted workflow for common tasks
Simple tasks, such as commits, can quickly be made without leaving the editor.
Pro Diffs are easy
Since it's integrated with Emacs, diffs are very easy to fix. You can jump right to any file you want to fix as soon as it comes up in the logs or in the status view.
Pro Easy to remember mnemonics
You can easily learn the mnemonics for the most common tasks and use them to your advantage to speed up your workflow.
Pro Better visualization and interactive workflow
Pro Stage hunks or even just parts of a hunk using a single key press
In Magit staging a hunk or even just part of a hunk is very easy.
Magit also implements several other "apply variants" in addition to staging and unstaging. For example: you can also discard or reverse a change, or apply it to the working tree.
Pro Blame information can be viewed inline with the file
Pro Multiple buffers are used to show contextual information
Pro Powerful rebasing
Pro Available in Homebrew
brew install magit
Pro Supports 3 way merges
For modern version control systems, 3way merge support is a basic requirement, but many other open source diff viewers do not adequately handle 3way merges.
Pro Free and open source
KDiff3 is completely free to download and use. It's also open source released under the GPL.
Pro Can compare directories
It is able to compare whole directory trees.
Pro Supports editing files directly
In addition to comparing two files it also allows you to edit the merge result right in place.
Pro Diff by character not by lines
On comparing two files, difference is shown by characters; not by lines.
Pro The UI is customizable
Allow customizing colors regardless of user/system theme.
Pro Supports manual code aligning
With selecting code in one window and hitting Ctrl+Y, then selecting some other code in second window and also hitting Ctrl+Y you can manually align the code.
Pro Preprocessing before calculating differences
There are options that may pre-process compared files before Kdiff3 actually do a comparison - to ignore for example automatically generated dates and/or revision numbers added by commit hooks.
Pro Context menu shortcut
You can right-click a folder/file and the options:
- Save <file> for later
- Compare with
will be available, making launching KDiff3 really convenient.
Cons
Con Useful only for people who use Emacs
Magit is only useful if your text editor of choice is Emacs. It wouldn't really make any sense to open up emacs just to run Magit if you use another editor.
Con Cannot do inline diffs
Comparison of 2 files is always side-by-side and there's no option for inline views. Overall a rather poor and confusing UI in general.
Con Confusing GUI
4 sub-windows (when you really only need 3), a lot of different colors and even more confusing result-window. No links what has changed between versions and and the result. It clearly shows it's dated or rather outdated. Great if you ever need to do a command line merge, otherwise it sucks.
Con No precise editing of the compared files
Precise work line-after-line is not possible. Only a version after the automated merge-step is editable, but not the two files separately.
Con No longer supported by Homebrew for MacOS
Cannot be installed easily on Mac as of Aug 2019.
Con Problems when files have different number of lines
For example, if you add 3 lines: A, B and C locally but on the other change there are only A and C, Kdiff3 will work out that A was added, then it says that B conflicts with C but adds C again anyway.
Con Slow for large files
Con No image compare
Compare is text based.
