Vimdiff strangeness

Question

I have strange problems with vimdiff, everytime I do something like this:

git difftool HEAD~2 -- src/some-file.hs

• first of all - it opens two separate windows, one - with the diff and the second - with the file by itself. Why and how do I fix that? I don't need no second window

• another problem is - it never makes width of two buffers same, the divider pushed all the way to the right and I have to manually do C-w+= to make them same width, how do I fix that?

difftooll set in .gitconfig as:

[diff]
    tool = gvimdiff

Also I have no idea how to set it right in SourceTree. I want to use vimdiff as external differ/merger

Answer 1

You can use vim as a git merge-tool, but its default appearance is pretty messy as you've noticed. You can clean this up by wrapping vim in a custom script and using that instead - an example is here http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/A_better_Vimdiff_Git_mergetool.

However if all you want is to view the diff directly and edit that, just open the file normally i.e. vim src/some-file.hs. git will have replaced the file with its version with conflict markers. YOu can use something like this to find the conflicts quickly https://github.com/rhysd/conflict-marker.vim - but I find just typing \>>>> is fast enough. For more complex cases I use the fugitive vim plugin (see next paragraph)

If you actually want to use vim to work on git conflicts on single files I'd recommend installing fugitive. Then you can do.

:e src/some-file.hs
:Gdiff

And get three buffers with the original, left and right version. But :Gdiff also accepts version arguments so you can compare non-conflicting files too.