When comparing P4Merge vs Fork, the Slant community recommends P4Merge for most people. In the question“What are the best visual merge tools for Git?” P4Merge is ranked 2nd while Fork is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose P4Merge is:
P4Merge is free of charge.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free
P4Merge is free of charge.
Pro 3 way merge support
P4Merge presents merge information in 4 panes - BASE, LOCAL, REMOTE and MERGE_RESULT.
Pro Detects minimal changes without having a common ancestor
After a merge sometimes you have conflicts. You can resolve them by using a merge tool. You can run git mergetool --tool-help
to get more details about what tools are supported.
You will get an output like the followinggit mergetool --tool=<tool>
may be set to one of the following:
p4merge
tortoisemerge
vimdiff
vimdiff2
vimdiff3
The following tools are valid, but not currently available:
araxis
bc
bc3
codecompare
deltawalker
diffmerge
diffuse
ecmerge
emerge
gvimdiff
gvimdiff2
gvimdiff3
kdiff3
meld
opendiff
tkdiff
winmerge
xxdiff
Some of the tools listed above only work in a windowed environment. If run in a terminal-only session, they will fail.
Pro Also has image diffing
For those who are working in both text based source code or files, as well as images, its nice to have the diff functionality of both present in the same product.
Pro Cross-platform with a good Mac port
P4Merge works on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Pro Fast and easy to use
Pro Comfortable when staging line-by-line changes
This feature is superior to the one that is implemented by SourceTree as it does not reset the file scroll view to the top of the file after each stage.
If you do feature-specific commits after some time of development - it's very important to be able to easily compose the commit from different line-based changes.
Pro Smart Diff is very handy
Pro Tabbed interface
Several repos can be open at once in individual tabs, so it's trivial to switch back and forth between them.
Pro Overall aesthetic
The GUI components are flawless on the Mac. It is expected to be a similar experience on Windows. Once you realize that you can filter by branch, your appreciation for the product will go up dramatically.
Pro Dark theme support
Pro Highlights the difference within a line
Pro Merge Conflict Resolution is great
Pro Comfortable keyboard shortcuts
Pro Repositories with uncommitted changes have a * next to their name
This is an update from previous versions.
Cons
Con Directory comparison is not supported
With P4Merge it's impossible to compare two different directories to find differences.
Con Still a young client, thus not as feature rich
This git GUI client is quite young compared to industry old-timers like git-tower 2 or SourceTree. So it's not as feature rich as you'd like. Still a very capable client for a simple day-to-day work.
Con No Linux version
This git client is not compatible with Linux making the life harder for the developers that work on both, MacOS and some Linux distro.
Con Requires granting access to your git projects for the developer of the app
