Automatically merge files

Question

When opening an A file, I'd like to check if there's a conflicting file B that follows some naming convention. If this happens, I'd like to transparently merge the content of B in A, keeping an ancestor C file (with known location and naming pattern) as a reference.

This should happen automatically and without any specific interaction by the user besides opening the A file. The ediff utility looks to be for interactive usage only.

If there are conflicting lines, they may just be both merged together with the typical dash-delimited diff output. The user may find and solve these conflicts manually with the enabled minor-mode smerge-mode on the A file buffer.

Ignoring the logic to find the B and C file, how can I just merge files automatically on Emacs? I'm not using any Version Control.

Answer 1

EDIT in response to your comment

Seems like indeed configuring the smerge-begin-re, smerge-lower-re, and smerge-end-re as follows before you activate smerge-mode

(setq-local smerge-begin-re "^#ifndef \\(.*\\)\n"
        smerge-end-re "^#endif \\(.*\\)\n"
        smerge-lower-re "^#else \\(.*\\)\n")

seals the deal.

This probably only works for 'simple' conflicts (see comments in 'smerge-mode.el'), but I guess that is good enough in this case.

END EDIT

AFAIK, 'merging' files is functionality provided by 'diff' tools. Emacs only provides modes/interfaces for interactive merging of output from certain diff tools, it does not provide the diff tools itself.

I am not sure, but it looks to me that the 'typical dash-delimited' diff output, is typical for Git. I don't know how to achieve that without Git.

Without version control, 'unconditional' merge of files can be achieved using the diff command with the -D flag e.g.:

diff --ifdef=AUTOMERGE file1.txt file2.txt > output.txt

From elisp you could invoke it as follows

(shell-command (format "diff -D AUTOMERGE %s %s > %s" "file1.txt" "file2.txt" "output.txt"))

However, unfortunately, smerge-mode does not seem to work for this output format.

Also, I don't know of any other interactive merging tool for this format. But if you know some elisp, then I guess it should not be very hard to create one yourself.

And of course, other people might know of any existing/better solutions.