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Using Visual Studio diff and merge tool with Git

Håkon K. Olafsen on English, Microsoft, Git, Sourcetreeapp, Diff, Merge, Vs2017, Visual-studio

On Windows I prefer to use Visual Studio’s diff and merge tools. And since I use git I decided to change the default diff and merge tools to Visual Studio 2017 (VS2017).

SourceTree App

I first changed the diff and merge tools in SourceTree App, just to test the settings. I found a nice blog post Using Visual Studio as diff/merge tool in Git and SourceTree by Michał Dudak explaining how to do this for VS 2015. Since Visual Studio 2017 have a different folder structure I had to look for vsdiffmerge.exe and with the help of the comments for a Gist I found the correct location.

In the Diff Options you choose to use Custom tools and use the following settings:

Command: (same for both diff and merge)

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Enterprise\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\vsDiffMerge.exe

Diff arguments:

"$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" "Source" "Target" //t

Merge arguments:

"$LOCAL" "$REMOTE" "$BASE" "$MERGED" //m

Git defaults using Git Bash

To change the git defaults using Git Bash you can do the following:

git config --global difftool.visualstudio.cmd "'C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Enterprise/Common7/IDE/CommonExtensions/Microsoft/TeamFoundation/Team Explorer/vsdiffmerge.exe' \$LOCAL \$REMOTE Source Target //ignorespace //t"

git config --global mergetool.visualstudio.cmd "'C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Enterprise/Common7/IDE/CommonExtensions/Microsoft/TeamFoundation/Team Explorer/vsdiffmerge.exe' \$LOCAL \$REMOTE \$BASE \$MERGED //ignorespace //m"
git config --global mergetool.visualstudio.trustExitCode true

git config --global diff.tool visualstudio
git config --global merge.tool visualstudio

Git defaults using cmd.exe

To change the git defaults using cmd.exe you can do the following:

git config --global difftool.visualstudio.cmd "'C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Enterprise/Common7/IDE/CommonExtensions/Microsoft/TeamFoundation/Team Explorer/vsdiffmerge.exe' $LOCAL $REMOTE Source Target //ignorespace //t"

git config --global mergetool.visualstudio.cmd "'C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio/2017/Enterprise/Common7/IDE/CommonExtensions/Microsoft/TeamFoundation/Team Explorer/vsdiffmerge.exe' $LOCAL $REMOTE $BASE $MERGED //ignorespace //m"
git config --global mergetool.visualstudio.trustExitCode true

git config --global diff.tool visualstudio
git config --global merge.tool visualstudio