In Visual Studio Code it seems that I am only allowed to push, pull and sync. There is documented support for merge conflicts but I can't figure out how to actually merge between two branches. The Git command line within VSC (press F1) only facillitates a subset of commands:

Oct 01, 2017  Git and Visual Studio 2017 part 5: Merging the changes. Merge in Visual Studio is a bit confusing, from my point of view. I hope this clears out what you are really doing! In the next article, I investigate re-basing ? Go to next article. Mar 20, 2013  How to Configure diff and Merge Tool in Visual Studio Git Tools. Merge tool of Visual Studio. You can go to commit pane and commit locally result of merge.

Attempting to pull from a an alternate branch or push to an alternate branch yields:

Here's the documentation on VSCode's Git Visual Studio Code Git Documentation

What am I overlooking?

TheFastCatTheFastCat

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4 Answers

Update June 2017 (from VSCode 1.14)

The ability to merge local branches has been added through PR 25731 and commit 89cd05f: accessible through the 'Git: merge branch' command.
And PR 27405 added handling the diff3-style merge correctly.

Vahid's answer mention 1.17, but that September release actually added nothing regarding merge.
Only the 1.18 October one added Git conflict markers

From 1.18, with the combination of merge command (1.14) and merge markers (1.18), you truly can do local merges between branches.

Original answer 2016:

The Version Control doc does not mention merge commands, only merge status and conflict support.

Even the latest 1.3 June release does not bring anything new to the VCS front.

This is supported by issue 5770 which confirms you cannot use VS Code as a git mergetool, because:

Is this feature being included in the next iteration, by any chance?

Probably not, this is a big endeavour, since a merge UI needs to be implemented.

That leaves the actual merge to be initiated from command line only.

VonCVonC

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You can do it without using plugins.

In the latest version of vscode that I'm using (1.17.0) you can simply open the branch that you want (from the bottom left menu) then press ctrl+shift+p and type Git: Merge branch and then choose the other branch that you want to merge from (to the current one)

VahidVahid

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I had the same question, so I created Git Merger.
hope this helps :)

Shahar KazazShahar Kazaz

I found this extension for VS code called Git Merger. It adds Git: Merge from to the commands.

Jay CulpepperJay Culpepper

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If you are using Visual Studio plugin for Git, but you have also configured Git with MSys git, probably you could be surprised by some Visual Studio behavior.

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If you are using Visual Studio plugin for Git, but you have also configured Git with MSys git, probably you could be surprised by some Visual Studio behavior. The most obvious one is that commits are done using the wrong user.name and user.email configuration as I’ve described in Visual Studio Tools for Git, a primer, other one can be: tools used to do merge and diff during conflicts.

Suppose you are working with Visual Studio, you issue a pull and find that there is some conflicts in repository.

Figure 1: Pull operation has a conflict

Now you should resolve all conflicts before being able to continue work: you can click on file name that is conflicting and you are presented with a UI different from the one you are used with standard TFS Source control.

Figure 2: Ui to manage conflicts when you are using Git in Visual Studio

If you press “compare files” to visualize diff of files, it could happen that kdiff3 is opened to visualize the difference, instead of resolving directly inside Visual Studio.

Figure 3: File compare is done with Kdiff3 instead of visualizing them inside Visual Studio

This happens because Visual Studio Git Plugin uses standard git configuration, your local repository probably does not have any specific tools for diff and merge (unless you configured them), so global settings are honored. To verify actual settings you can open a Git Bash on the repository, issue a git config –list command and look at merge.tool and diff.tool settings