How can I see my place in history during an 'hg rebase' conflict?

Whenever I perform an hg rebase and there are merge conflicts, it immediately pulls up an editor for me to resolve the conflict. However, it doesn't give me any information about where in the rebase process I am at. For example, if my history looks as follows:

Performing hg rebase -s 11 -d 10 may have a conflict trying to apply either 11 or 12. It is difficult to tell at a glance just from the merge conflict where I am stopped, especially when the graph is larger than this. How can I tell where in the rebase process the conflict is?

Solution

Very recent Mercurials have two configuration options: [ui] mergemarkertemplate, and [ui] pre-merge-tool-output-template, which can be used to improve this situation a bit.

`pre-merge-tool-output-template`

pre-merge-tool-output-template is printed before running any external merge tool. This can be used to print something before your editor or kdiff3 pops up; note that if you use a terminal-based merge tool (such as most editors unless they're the gui version), it'll likely be hidden by the merge tool. Depending on OS and what program you're using, you may be able to hit Ctrl-Z to suspend your merge tool to see this output.

Example output:

merging path/to/file

Running merge tool for path/to/file (/usr/bin/vim):
- local (working copy): 10:2d1f533d add binary file (#2) tip default
-          base (base): 6:abcd1234 some other description default
-    other (merge rev): 9:1e7ad7d7 add binary file (#1) default
... vim runs here ...

See https://www.mercurial-scm.org/repo/hg/file/14589f1989e9/tests/test-merge-tools.t#l1956 for the template that produced that output, hg help config.ui.pre-merge-tool-output-template and hg help templates for more information on that.

`mergemarkertemplate`

mergemarkertemplate controls the conflict markers you see in your editor. Set [ui] mergemarkers=detailed and see if this is sufficient; if not, you can use [ui] mergemarkertemplate to customize it; this can also be customized on a per-merge-tool basis, so see hg help config.ui.mergemarkers, hg help config.ui.mergemarkertemplate, and hg help config.merge-tools.

Programs with customizable labels

Merge tools like kdiff3 often have the ability to customizable the labels. In the default configuration, this should be the operation-provided name for the base/local/other (in my example above, this would be base, working copy, and merge rev, respectively. I believe if you have [ui] mergemarkers=detailed or [merge-tools] kdiff3.mergemarkers=detailed, these will include additional information. See hg help config.merge-tools for more information on the per-merge-tool configuration options.