Thanks! I've been tinkering with VS Code (migrating from IntelliJ) recently - I've found that they're at pretty-much feature parity. VS Code makes it much harder to attach a debugger (IME, though I might just not grok it yet), but is more customizable and a lot less of a memory-hog. I think I'm comfortable adopting it as my daily driver. And, as you say, any IDE's Merge Editor is usually clearer than the equivalent direct from the CLI!

However, I wasn't complaining about Merge Conflicts - I do dislike them, but they're a necessary evil (well, until AI can resolve all conflicts itself :P ). Rather, I was complaining about Merge Commits. See my comment here for more context.