Open in Merge Tool not working (vim.exe)

[Vanerio]

Hi!
Using this setting:
DIFF/MERGE TOOL / Tool / Use Git Settings

When you click on Open in Merge Tool no additional window opens. This encourages users to press the button multiple times, thinking it hasn't been pressed.

However, every time you press it, a vim.exe process runs in the background and consumes a very high amount of CPU.
These processes won’t close until they are terminated from the Task Manager.

OS: Win 10
sourcegit: 2025.31

[love-linger]

SourceGit only supports external diff/merge tool with a valid GUI frontend. Please use GVIM or other else.

[Vanerio]

I think there should be a warning indicating that no valid tool have been set yet. And of course the task should be canceled after the warning to avoid vim.exe problem.
And that makes me wonder what is the point of having a Use Git Settings option in the Tool combobox then.
Thank you!!!

[gadfly3173]

And that makes me wonder what is the point of having a Use Git Settings option in the Tool combobox then.

Out of the 24 merge tool configurations included by default in Git for Windows, only three are CLI-based:

• emerge
• vimdiff
• nvimdiff

The rest are GUI tools, and many popular ones are still missing from this app's setup. Configuring custom tools via git config can save a lot of hassle.

[love-linger]

I think there should be a warning indicating that no valid tool have been set yet. And of course the task should be canceled after the warning to avoid vim.exe problem.

Since the operation of opening the difftool in the git configuration is achieved through the command git difftool -g --no-prompt <other_diff_options>, SourceGit cannot determine whether this CLI tool is suitable. As shown in your screenshot, vim was launched correctly, but the current environment is not a shell/console environment, so we can not see it.

[gadfly3173]

Since the operation of opening the difftool in the git configuration is achieved through the command git difftool -g --no-prompt <other_diff_options>, SourceGit cannot determine whether this CLI tool is suitable. As shown in your screenshot, vim was launched correctly, but the current environment is not a shell/console environment, so we can not see it.

Perhaps we could check the currently configured tool name via git config get diff.tool, and if it's emerge, vimdiff[1-3], or nvimdiff[1-3], we could warn that CLI tools might not display properly? This should cover warning most users who use vim.