Use vimdiff as git mergetool

Ruslan Osipov has a very handy tutorial on how to setup Vim text editor as git merge tool, for resolving git conflicts.

Basically, run the following commands to tell git to use Vim as a merge tool (don’t forget the –global flag if you want it for all your projects, not just the current one):

git config merge.tool vimdiff
git config merge.conflictstyle diff3
git config mergetool.prompt false

With that, running “git mergetool” after a conflict was reported, will result in something like this:

The three way split window will show local version (–ours) on the left, the remote version (–theirs) on the right, and the base version with the conflict in the middle.  You can then get changes from one window into another using the following Vim diffget commands:

:diffg RE  " get from REMOTE
:diffg BA  " get from BASE
:diffg LO  " get from LOCAL

Awesomeness!

Check a few of Ruslan’s other vim-related articles.

The Most Mentioned Books On StackOverflow

Slashdot links to “The Most Mentioned Books On StackOverflow“.

How we did it:

  • We got database dump of all user-contributed content on the Stack Exchange network (can be downloaded here)
  • Extracted questions and answers made on stackoverflow
  • Found all amazon.com links and counted it
  • Created tag-based search for your convenience
  • Brought it to you

I’ve previously linked to a similar selection of “Top 29 books on Amazon from Hacker News comments“.

PHP vs Python vs Ruby: Detailed Comparison

PHP vs Python vs Ruby: Detailed Comparison compares the three popular languages in a variety of categories, such as total market share, large website deployments, usability, learning curve, popularity, performance, etc.  It’s a nice overview if you are about to pick one of these languages for the future projects, or if you are (like me) have been stuck with one of them for a long time, and haven’t really kept an eye on what’s going on in the rest of the world.

Migrating a PHP 5 App to PHP 7

This year I’ll be migrating quite a bit of stuff from PHP 5 to PHP 7.  We haven’t started with the process yet, but with the recent indicators like PHPUnit 6 release, I’m sure the priority of this work will start rising.

Obviously, I’m familiar with the new features of PHP 7 and some of the things that will have to be done in order to port the applications and make use of the new version.  But it still helps reading through articles like “Migrating a PHP 5 App to PHP 7 “, which comes in two parts: