in practice, suppose you want to do a merge of files that have more structure than plain text. e.g. code belonging to specific a programming language, json, som

in practice, suppose you want to do a merge of files that have more structure than plain text. e.g. code belonging to specific a programming language, json, some data format for an application, etc. This all has a lot more structure than just plain text. You can do a better job of diffing and merging if your difftool and mergetool is aware of the structure of your file. text-based tooling that git offers is to some extent a lowest-common denominator. in principle you can build custom tooling for your format / context that does a better job. one extension point that git offers for this is the "merge driver". you can define an external script/application that will be called by git whenever a merge conflict needs to be resolved for some particular file (based on path or a pattern). Here's an older blog post describing a custom git merge driver for merging data files in a game engine: http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2010/06/avoiding-content-locks-and-conflicts-3.html http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2010/06/avoiding-content-locks-... In this gamedev context of merging game data files, it was less important to produce the "correct" merge result than it was to produce some result that had a valid file format. Less technical users could then fix up bad mergetool decisions in an editor with a UI instead of trying to resolve the merge conflicts at the level of the raw serialisation format itself (which could corrupt the data file and make it not possible to load into the editor). In other situations where there is a large cost to automatically producing the wrong merge result, it would be a better tradeoff to "halt the line" if there is ambiguity about how a merge should be resolved, and escalate to a human to decide what to do. Further reading: How to wire a custom merge driver in to git: https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_defining_a_custom_merge_driver https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_defining_a_custom_me... What values you can pass in to a merge driver on the command line: https://github.com/git/git/blob/f1d4a28250629ae469fc5dd59ab843cb2fd68e12/ll-merge.c https://github.com/git/git/blob/f1d4a28250629ae469fc5dd59ab8... Simple example of the plumbing to wire in a merge driver, with a trivial dumb driver script: https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver https://github.com/Praqma/git-merge-driver