Dealing with Merge Conflicts

This week I continued learning Git by practicing creating branches and merging them back to main.

In my Static Site Generator static-dodo, I added two new issues, one to Add support for inline code blocks and the other to Add support for a horizontal rule in Markdown.

Instead of working on these issues in the main branch one by one, I created a branch for each and started working on these in parallel. After adding the necessary code to both branches, I decided to use git merge to merge both back into main.

git merge issue-13 main

The first one was an easy fast-forward merge. This means that the HEAD of main is simply moved to the latest commit in issue-13.

git merge issue-14 main

This second one created a conflict. The reason is that on the same line where I added code for issue 13, I also wrote code for issue 14.
Git in this case put it all together while adding these helpful lines to the file:

<<<<<<< HEAD
Line from main branch
=======
Line from issue-14 branch
>>>>>>> issue-14

This time all I wanted to do was to keep both lines, so I simply deleted the <<<<<<<, =======, >>>>>>> lines. Here is the merge commit.

This was a simple exercise but it made me realize how powerful Git can be and I still feel like I have only scratched the surface of it. I am now getting ready to start Hacktoberfest and I hope to find some good projects to contribute to!