c17rThe Future of Version Control
The thing about how merges are presented seems orthogonal to how to represent history. I also hate the default in git, but that is why I just use p4merge as a merge tool and get a proper 4-pane merge tool (left, right, common base, merged result) which shows everything needed to figure out why there is a conflict and how to resolve it. I don't understand why you need to switch out the VCS to fix that issue.
Even if you don’t use p4merge, you can set Git’s merge.conflictStyle config to "diff3" or "zdiff3" (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config...). If you do that, Git’s conflict markers show the base version as well:
<<<<<<< left
||||||| base
def calculate(x):
a = x * 2
b = a + 1
return b
=======
def calculate(x):
a = x * 2
logger.debug(f"a={a}")
b = a + 1
return b
>>>>>>> right
With this configuration, a developer reading the raw conflict markers could infer the same information provided by Manyana’s conflict markers: that the right side added the logging line.
That still have an issue with the vocabulary. Things like "theirs/our" is still out of touch but it's already better than a loose spatial analogy on some representation of the DAG.
Something like base, that is "common base", looks far more apt to my mind. In the same vein, endogenous/exogenous would be far more precise, or at least aligned with the concern at stake. Maybe "local/alien" might be a less pompous vocabulary to convey the same idea.
I ended up creating a personal vim plugin for merges one night because of a frustrating merge experience and never being able to remember what is what. It presents just two diff panes at top to reduce the cognitive load and a navigation list in a third split below to switch between diffs or final buffer (local/remote, base/local, base/remote and final). The list has branch names next to local/remote so you always know what is what. And most of the time the local/remote diff is what I am interested in so that’s what it shows first.