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I've read the man pages for mergetool and difftool but I guess I'm still not clear on the general differences between the two. They both call up a merge tool of some sort, right? The point of running a diff is to merge, right?

What's the layman's descriptions for each of these directives?

update: I guess I need to expand on this question. Yes... one says diff. The other one says merge. But what is the purpose/use of running a diff? Can you decide, upon seeing the diff, that you want to go ahead and merge? Are diff tools generally the same tools you run for merges? If you run mergetool and then canceled the merge, didn't you just essentially do what difftool did?

Jeremy Ricketts
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2 Answers2

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They are two different operations, and you could technically have two different programs configured (in the Git world, at least) to perform each operation.

  • DIFF - you want to see the differences between two files (or more, and/or folder structures)
  • MERGE - you want to see the differences between two (or more) files and try to merge them together into a single output file

The MERGE might show DIFFs as part of it's working, but they are separate things. A lot of diff programs have blurred the lines over the years and started to handle merging as well.

Nicholas Head
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A difftool is called to show the differences between two or more files.

A mergetool is called to help you merge the differences between two or more files.

Alexsander Akers
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