I've noticed that many people do use git for syncing their notes and treat manual conflict handling simply as part of life. For some reasons I just can't bring myself to like it, but I also really would like to have full syncing capabilities on Org mode.

I've seen that in 2012 some folks implemented a dedicated merge driver (org-merge-driver[1]) which only covers the basics but is aware of org syntax and operated on a per-headline basis, merging tags if needed and identifying changes from the name/id of the headline.

I've been wondering if something like this could be re-implemented using org-mode's own parser (org-element). I've been reading a paper that describes a three way merge for XML documents (and generic hierarchical documents) without IDs being involved[2] and another paper that describes a way to merge ordered sequences that takes movements (even crossing ones), deletions and insertions into account[3]. Nothing bleeding edge and I wonder if something like this may stand on its own feet from a functional and performance perspective.

Do you think something like this may be a good idea? Do you have some advice to give on this regard? Sorry for the quite abstract and quite fluff-y post, but this idea has been hanging in my head for too long.

[0] https://github.com/simonthum/git-sync

[1] https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/gsoc2012/student-projects/git-merge-tool/manual.html

[2] A three-way merge for XML documents :: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1030397.1030399

[3] A graph-based algorithm for three-way merging of ordered collections in EMF models :: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167642315000532