To be fair that’s not the entire story, since you need to actually resolve the conflicts first, which is slightly scary since your worktree will be broken while you do it and your Linter will be shouting at you.

You may also want a dedicated merge tool that warns you before accidentally commiting a conflict and creating a broken commit.

Oh and non trivial resolutions may or may not create an evil merge which may or may not be desirable depending on which subset of git automation features you use.

Using git status often is definitely good advice though.

I agree.

If your build fails because you can’t track down the literal ≠ in the code I would recommend just looking at the compiler error. I understand the concerns about == vs = more but the vast majority of LSPs (and some compilers) will catch that too.

I have also yet to see any IDE enable ligatures by default, at least VS Code and the JetBrains suite both require opting into them even though their default fonts support them.