What’s the practical difference between a git merge and a git pull?

Question

In day-to-day developing I always use git pull to take the changes from the main branch, where the parallel developments are merged. But some Ides like Netbeans, implement the "git merge -ff origin develop" command for example to update the git Toolbar.

I could be doing git merge, would have the same effect, merging other developers' changes to my implementation branch, I would have the same effect, since:

to update your local repository with the newest version, run git pull in your workbook to get and merge (merge) remote changes. to merge another branch into your branch active (e.g. master), use git merge <branch>, in both cases git try to merge the changes automatically.

Source: http://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/index.pt_BR.html

But in practice, what would be the difference between the git pull and the git merge, when updating my local job with changes from another branch?

In both cases a merge will be made at the end, or it will generate a conflict resolution to hit. But I wonder if using git pull instead of git merge is really the right one and what the implications might be.

Then it would be possible to show cases that differentiate the exclusive use of both?

Answer 1

git pull is the same thing as git fetch + git merge

Example:

git pull origin master

is the same thing as:

git fetch origin
git merge origin/master

Documentation in https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-pull.html