Conflicts

A conflict happens when the same note changed in two places since they last agreed — usually two machines, occasionally you and a colleague on a shared vault.

Because a note is a single file, and files are edited by one person at a time far more often than not, real conflicts are rare. But rare is not never, and one note silently overwritten destroys any reason to trust a notes app with the rest.

What Open Note does

It stops. The vault enters a conflicted state and every automatic loop halts. Nothing commits, nothing pushes, nothing pulls. The status bar turns red and says Conflict.

It tells you which notes. Conflicted files are listed on the conflict screen and badged in the sidebar.

It offers you three ways out, per file:

• Keep mine — your version wins, wholesale.
• Keep theirs — the incoming version wins, wholesale.
• Merge by hand — the note opens with Git’s conflict markers left in, exactly as Git wrote them, and you edit it into the version you want.

It checks your work. When you say a file is resolved, Open Note asks Git whether it agrees. If Git still reports unmerged paths, the app does not believe you and stays conflicted. This is deliberate: an app that takes your word for it would happily let you push a note with <<<<<<< in it.

Once every file is resolved the rebase continues and normal syncing resumes.

What it will never do

• Auto-merge. No heuristics, no “last write wins”, no clever three-way guess.
• Auto-discard. Neither side is thrown away without you choosing it.
• Force-push. There is no setting for it, in any state.

Automation in Open Note is aggressive but never destructive. That distinction is the whole product.

Reading the markers

If you merge by hand, this is what you will see:

<<<<<<< ours
- [ ] Call the dentist on Tuesday
=======
- [ ] Call the dentist on Thursday
>>>>>>> theirs

Delete the markers and the line you do not want, leaving the note as it should read. Save, then mark it resolved.

A note on “ours” and “theirs”. Mid-rebase Git inverts these relative to intuition: “ours” is the upstream work being replayed onto, and “theirs” is your own commit. Open Note’s buttons are labelled from your point of view and do the translation for you, so Keep mine always means your work. If you are editing the raw file, the markers are Git’s own and follow Git’s convention.

Starting over

If a merge is going badly, Abort runs git rebase --abort and returns the vault to exactly where it was before the pull. Nothing is lost; you are simply back to being behind the remote.

Avoiding them

• Let a machine finish syncing before you move to another. Watch for Synced in the status bar.
• Press Mod S before closing the lid, which commits and pushes immediately rather than waiting on a timer.
• For genuinely shared vaults, use branches. Two people on separate branches merging deliberately is far calmer than two people on main.