Resolving conflicts with vimdiff

Often, during development, you’ll find yourself needing to compare some files—be it comparing different output or versions of a file, or dealing with merge conflicts as multiple developers collaborate on a single file. Vim provides vimdiff, a standalone binary that excels at file comparison operations.

Comparing two files

Using vimdiff to compare two files is fairly simple. Let’s look at two files in spam/kitchen/: kitchen/bacon.py and kitchen/egg.py. We’d like to know what’s different between the two.

Code location

The files from this example are available from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Mastering-Vim-Second-Edition/tree/main/Chapter05/spam.

Open the files with vimdiff:

$ vimdiff kitchen/bacon.py kitchen/egg.py

You will be greeted by the following screen (how colorful the screen is will depend on your colorscheme):

Figure 5.13 – The vimdiff window shows...