Mercurial Diff Merge: What tool is this and how do I use it?

Question

I am new to mercurial, I am quite familiar with TortoiseHG, but this is the first time I am managing a project in a headless linux environment. I do an hg update after a push, and I get this screen:

Help section says it's vim, how do I go about merging my application.

Answer 1

This is vimdiff. You can learn more about it by running man vimdiff.

However, I would recommend using mercurial's internal:merge tool. It will perform the merge and, if a conflict occurs, insert conflict markers in the file and notify you that there was a conflict. You then open up the file, resolve the conflict, remove the conflict markers, mark the file as resolved, and when all files are cleaned up you can commit the result of the merge. This is very similar to how subversion handles conflicts. You can configure mercurial to use internal:merge by adding the following to your ~/.hgrc file:

[ui] merge=internal:merge 

The tool you'll use to get the list of conflicted files and mark them resolved is called hg resolve, so I would recommend running hg help resolve to learn more about that tool. You can learn more about mercurial's support for merge tools by running: hg help merge-tools.