Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Making "am -3" default may also scare users who are not exactly > comfortable with reading "git diff" output during a conflicted merge > and resolving a conflict, but other than that there shouldn't be any > downside. Another obvious downside is that there are those of us who prefer to run "am" without "-3" first to notice that the patch we expect to apply cleanly does apply cleanly, which gives us a chance to catch mistakes. I personally feel that as long as there is a configuration that makes -3 a personal default (with --no-3way override from the command line), it is a better design not to enable "-3" by default for everybody. New people can first learn using both forms and then after they got comfortable with resolving merges, they can choose to flip the default for themselves.