Git Difftool and Meld as a Flatpak

I’ve recently started migrating many of the applications on my Fedora 36 laptop to their Flatpak versions. For the most part, this has been pretty straightforward, although there isn’t really any method for migrating configuration and data. Today I ran into a problem with Meld, a graphical diff utility, and using it with the git difftool command. Below I’ll share how I worked around this problem.

Normally, the integration between Git and Meld—which is what enables you to run git difftool and have the results show up in Meld—would look something like this (this is from ~/.gitconfig):

[merge]
    tool = meld
[diff]
    tool = meld
[difftool]
    prompt = no
[difftool "meld"]
    cmd = /usr/bin/meld "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"
[mergetool "meld"]
    cmd = /usr/bin/meld "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

However, when Meld is installed as a Flatpak, /usr/bin/meld doesn’t exist. In order to continue using Meld with the git difftool command, you must change the Git configuration to look like this instead:

[merge]
    tool = meld
[diff]
    tool = meld
[difftool]
    prompt = no
[difftool "meld"]
    cmd = flatpak run org.gnome.Meld "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"
[mergetool "meld"]
    cmd = flatpak run org.gnome.Meld "$LOCAL" "$REMOTE"

In addition to the change above, I found it necessary to use Flatseal to modify the permissions of the Meld Flatpak to include the /tmp directory. (You can optionally make that read-only as well.)

After you make these changes, using Meld with git difftool should work as expected again.

This is a pretty straightforward change, but hopefully documenting it here will prove helpful to someone. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on Twitter. Thanks!

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