Leon Mika

I’m dealing with a lot of conflicts today as I try to clear a backlog of Git rebases in my to-do pile. I’ve been using GoLand to do this, as my current Git “mergetool” is configured to Vimdiff for some reason¹ and I’m not really bothered to find some other tool, at least not yet. GoLand does a pretty good job.

Unfortunately, the default key-bindings for resolving conflicts in GoLand is far from good. About the quarter of actions are bound to keys that make sense. Half the actions, like ignoring hunks, are not bound to anything, while the last quarter are bound to keys that result in a suboptimal experience. For example, the key to accept changes for a delta use the arrow keys, whereas the key to go to the next delta is F7. What a strange default. I’d have to constantly move my hand off the arrow keys over to the Fn row if I want to go through and fix each delta. This, plus moving over to the mouse to select an action not bound to a key, makes resolving conflicts really slow.

Fortunately GoLand allows remapping keys to pretty much anything, so I’d figured it’s time to fix this problem. I set about coming up with a nicer key-mapping scheme for resolving conflicts. I wanted to come up with one that adhered to these principals as best it can:

1. My hands must not move from where they rest on the keyboard for almost the entire time a file is being worked upon. The only exception are actions that are invoked less frequently and have a large radius of change — such as the accepting all changes from the left or the right. I’d figured it’s still okay to use the mouse for those.
2. The arrow keys should be used for navigation (go here) and for addressing (this one).
3. The modifier keys should be used for choosing the operation, such as going to the next delta, or choosing or ignoring a change.

Here’s the key-map I’ve come up with. The actions marked with an asterisk were the one’s that I needed to change. All these actions are within the “Version Control Systems > Diff & Merge” group within the “Keymap” section in preferences.

I’ve only tried this out as part of a single rebasing session, but already it feels so much faster. It’s taken me probably half the time to go through each file now, maybe even better. I also like the fact that most of the time I only need to hold down Ctrl and Cmd key, and use the arrows to move to and accept changes. Ignoring a change involves moving my left pinky to the Shift key, adding a bit of resistance to indicate an action that requires just that little bit more care.

We’ll see how this goes as I deal with future conflicts, and I may make a change or to. But this is looking really promising.

One last note: this was done in GoLand but I’d imagine it’s possible to set this key-mapping up in most, if not all, of JetBrain’s other IDEs.