Re: ediff customization: -w -B... + refinement

[tury.peter@gmail.com]

Hi,

thanks for your hints!

Kevin Rodgers wrote:
> Peter Tury wrote:
> > I see different results in Emacs ediff and out-of-emacs command line
> > diff.
> >
> > I try to get rid of white space and new line diffs, so I tried diff -a
> > -w -B --binary ... It produces the desired output in command line, but
> > whitespace- and newline-differences are showed (and treated) in
> > Emacs. Why? I set ediff-diff-options to "-a -w -B --binary", but it
> > seems to be ignored? Why? How to get rid of such whitespace diffs? I
> > tried ##, but nothing changed.
> >
> To see what diff program is used:
>
> M-: (executable-find ediff-diff-program)

Thanks, now I checked it: it's OK.

> I don't think you can find out after the fact what command was run,
> but you could see which options are used dynamically by examining the
> 4th argument passed to ediff-exec-process:
>
> M-x debug-on-entry RET ediff-exec-process

I checked this also now, thanks for the hint, but found nothing
interesting.

> Looking at its source code in ediff-diff.el, I find:
>
>      ;; the --binary option, if present, should be used only for buffer jobs
>      ;; or for refining the differences
>      (or (string-match "buffer" (symbol-name ediff-job-name))
> 	(eq buffer ediff-fine-diff-buffer)
> 	(setq args (delete "--binary" args)))
>
> So maybe you need to use M-x ediff-buffers instead of M-x ediff-files
> to use the --binary option.

Now I find that opening two files and ediff-buffers and ediff-files
them, shows different results!? Maybe because of this --binary stuff?
For first sight ediff-buffers seems to be OK. Maybe some file encoding
makes the difference?

>
> > My other question: what to do if I want refinement to show differences
> > by chars and not by words?
>
> Try: (setq ediff-forward-word-function 'forward-char)

I couldn't: with M-: it became buffer-local, and didn't affect the
result :-((