Ediff is a thing of beauty. It provides a way of not only seeing the difference between two files but for merging various differences into a third combined file. It’s very powerful and flexible. The problem is that using it can seem extraordinary complex. There’s a command menu that may or may not appear in your current frame but even if it does there are a plethora of options most of which are unfathomably opaque.
Charles Choi is once again easing our pain by providing a transient menu that tries to bring sanity to the confusion. His new package, casual ediff, tries to cut through the confusion. Take a look at his post to see causal ediff in action.
Ediff is really powerful and every Emacs user should be able to use it. Choi’s casual ediff can help with that but as I learned from this video from Prot, you can ignore most of the complexity of ediff. There are really only a very commands that you need to know. As I said in my post about Prot’s video:
All you really need to know is n for the next diff, p for the previous diff, and a, b, or c to move the A, B, or C diff to the other buffer(s). That’s it. It covers almost everything you ever really want to do in Ediff.
If you’re casual suite user, by all means include casual ediff in your repertoire but if you’re not and just want to make using ediff as simple as possible, take a look at Prot’s video.