Can TortoiseMerge be used as a difftool with Windows Git Bash?

Question

I\'m just starting to work with Git. I would like to use TortoiseMerge as the difftool and mergetool.

In my $HOME/.gitconfig I have the following sections.

Answer 1

Great answer by Klas Mellbourn! Saved me a lotta time. One shortcoming is, newly Added or Removed files in the repository will not show up during the difftool command execution. There's nothing to compare them to! Here's what I did on top of this: (Inspired by my co-worker's answer).

1. Create a file named empty.empty in $Home directory (execute start ~ in your bash). And as the name suggests, keep it empty.
2. Create another file named tortoisediff.sh in $Home/bin directory with following content

:

#!/bin/sh
# $LOCAL $REMOTE seem to be swapped
# $1 is $LOCAL
# $2 is $REMOTE

difftool='/c/Program Files/TortoiseGit/bin/TortoiseGitMerge.exe'
NULL="/dev/null"
empty="C:/home/empty.empty"

if [ "$1" == "$NULL" ]; then
    echo "Added: " "$2"
    "$difftool" /base:"$empty" /mine:"$2" /readonly:"$empty"
elif [ "$2" == "$NULL" ]; then
    echo 'Removed: ' "$1"
    "$difftool" /base:"$1" /readonly:"$1" /mine:"$empty"
else
    echo 'Modified' "$2"
    "$difftool" /base:"$1" /basename:"$1" /readonly:"$1" /mine:"$2" /minename:"$2"
fi

# Checkout https://tortoisegit.org/docs/tortoisegitmerge/tme-automation.html for more

3. Modify your .gitconfig file (Line 11 of the answer)

   cmd = tortoisediff.sh "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

This would now make difftool refer to tortoisediff.sh instead of opening the application directly.

4. Keep in mind: you'd have to run git add . followed by git difftool --staged instead of simply git difftool.