prettier-diff as a git merge driver

[snoblenet]

Have you considered extending this project so it can be used as a git merge driver?

[josephfrazier]

Hey, this sounds like a cool idea! I'm not too familiar with merge drivers though, can you describe the type of situation this would help with?

[snoblenet]

Sure. Because Git's built in diff/merge/rebase strategies work on a line-by-line basis, not function-by-function or expression-by-expression, the merge conflict markers that it generates are at the start and end of the smallest number of lines that can be grouped together to a show a change, rather than at the end of each affected function or expression. This can make resolving merge conflicts very difficult, especially when there are many levels of nesting in the syntax.

[josephfrazier]

Hmm, I can see how this would be useful for projects that use Prettier, but accept contributions which may not already be formatted with Prettier. Not sure how feasible it would be to support non-Prettier projects though.

Even if the merge driver isn't implemented, the same effect could be achieved by running Prettier on both branches before merging them, right?