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Darren Lewis

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Published: January 21, 2014

There’s plenty of information available on the net for configuring your visual diff/merge tool of choice for git. However, a lot of it is out of date. As of Jan 2014 using git v 1.8.4 this is the concise guide to setting up your visual diff and merge tool(s) of choice.

Add the following to your .gitconfig. If you don’t know what that is go here.

[diff]
   external = C:\Program Files\Perforce\p4merge.exe
    tool = p4merge
[difftool "p4merge"]
    cmd = p4merge.exe $LOCAL $REMOTE
[difftool]
    prompt = false
[merge]
    tool = p4merge
[mergetool "p4merge"]
    cmd = p4merge.exe $BASE $LOCAL $REMOTE $MERGED

I’m using p4merge by Perforce. It’s free and supports the git three way merge well. If you want to use any other tool of choice add it to your path and replace the references to the .exe accordingly.