Skip to content
  • catlan 
  • 2 min read

Resolving Merge Conflicts in VSCode with Kaleidoscope’s 3-way Merge

VSCode is a powerful IDE that can be used with all the world’s programming languages through a vast ecosystem of extensions.

And now there is one more. The new Kaleidoscope extension for VSCode allows you to:

  • Compare entire files
  • Compare a selection of text
  • Show git difftool results
  • Run git mergetool

The extension provides these functionalities through a comprehensive set of menu choices and toolbar buttons. And you can use Kaleidoscope or another tool of your choice to carry out these tasks.

Resolving merge conflicts with the Kaleidoscope extension is particularly useful. VSCode’s built-in merge conflict option can highlight the problematic part, but falls short in making it easy to decide which changes to accept.

Editing a Merge Conflict in VSCode

The available actions don’t offer any visual clue as to what the result will look like. 

This is where a 3-way merge shines. You can see the file with your edits and with the remote edits. In between those two versions, you can see the end result of saving the merged changes.

Three-Way Merge in Kaleidoscope lets you edit and see the end result

It is hard to go back to using the raw merge conflict once you’ve tried a 3-way merge tool like Kaleidoscope. 

We hope you enjoy our VSCode extension. As always we’re happy to get your feedback. And if you like our extension, a good rating is appreciated!