Sublime Forum

Why Sublime Merge doesn't work for me - some suggestions

#1

Hi there :slight_smile: I’ve been an avid user of Sublime Text for years now, so I thought I’d give Sublime Merge a shot as well. For general git workflow, I love the git CLI, so I had no intention of moving away from that. But I thought that Sublime Merge may be able to replace gitk and meld (ugh) for me perhaps. I haven’t gotten around to try Sublime Merge for conflict resolution, but it can certainly not replace gitk for me, so let me tell you why.

gitk may be butt ugly, but it quickly shows me all I want to see. I just run gitk from the shell and will see all the commits on the current branch, starting with the most recent one. That’s the first thing I noticed about Sublime Merge. I’m also seeing commits from other branches. This is an issue for me already. It’s information I don’t want to see. If I could get just a list of commits that are on the branch I am on, that’d be perfect.

The next thing that doesn’t work is feeding a branch or tag name or commit hash to Sublime Merge from the shell. gitk my-branch will bring up gitk with all the commits on my-branch. In Sublime Merge, I have to do this step in the GUI. I can get used to that, but again, it will only navigate to the HEAD of that branch, instead of showing me only the commits on that branch, which is a no-go for me.

These two points are already enough for me to not consider switching. Another thing I noticed is that Sublime Merge’s blame seems to be very slow. It takes around 15 seconds on any given file to start showing me all the commits on the lines. git blame takes a second or so on the same file. Not a deal breaker, but would’ve been nice to have something more pretty than just git blame output inside Sublime Text which I’m using now :wink:

Those things aside, Sublime Merge feels very good to use. It’s fluent, looks nice, all that fluff. If it will improve in the future and end up satisfying my needs/workflow, I will likely end up buying it.

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#2

Alt+click the eye icon next to the branch you want to see & it’ll hide all of the other branches. Alternatively, you can run the Hide All Branches Except... command in the command palette to choose the branch to only-show.

As far as I know, there isn’t a way to make this behavior auto-run using smerge.

Really? I haven’t seen blame take longer than a second. How many commits are in the repo you saw this behavior with and in what way are you using it?

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#3

I’ll give that a spin. Too bad it can’t be default behavior, though.

The repository I tried this in has around 34k commits right now. In what way? Not sure what exactly you mean. I just use Sublime Text’s blame from the command palette. I can see the file in Sublime Merge immediately, but it takes quite a long time to have the lines annotated with the respective commits. The file in question is also only about 200 lines, so the size of it shouldn’t be an issue.

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