Seriously!

Why not show the names of the branch + short Id (and when is not direct name, at least "this is from NAME")

I ended up creating a personal vim plugin for merges one night because of a frustrating merge experience and never being able to remember what is what. It presents just two diff panes at top to reduce the cognitive load and a navigation list in a third split below to switch between diffs or final buffer (local/remote, base/local, base/remote and final). The list has branch names next to local/remote so you always know what is what. And most of the time the local/remote diff is what I am interested in so that’s what it shows first.

Let’s see if I get this wrong after 25 years of git:

ours means what is in my local codebase.

theirs means what is being merged into my local codebase.

I find it best to avoid merge conflicts than to try to resolve them. Strategies that keep branches short lived and frequently merging main into them helps a lot.

iirc ours is always the commit the merge is starting from. the issue is that with a merge your current commit is the merging commit while with a rebase it is reversed.

I suspect that this could be because the rebase command is implemented as a serie of merges/cherry-picks from the target branch.

This is one of my pain points, and one time I googled and got the real answer (which is why it's such a pain point).

That answer is "It depends on the context"

> The reason the "ours" and "theirs" notions get swapped around during rebase is that rebase works by doing a series of cherry-picks, into an anonymous branch (detached HEAD mode). The target branch is the anonymous branch, and the merge-from branch is your original (pre-rebase) branch: so "--ours" means the anonymous one rebase is building while "--theirs" means "our branch being rebased".[0]

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25576415/what-is-the-pre...