Re: [OT] org and diff

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2022-12-17, at 03:06, Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com> wrote:

> marcin> One question I'd ask is: how important a legible diff is to
> you?  I keep my Org files in Git, too, but if /I/ know what was
> changed, I just don't care about diff going nuts and I treat it as
> (more or less) Git's internal implementation detail.
>
> for org, i mostly use git for reviewing changes.  it is only one step
> more sophisticated than saving old and diffing.
>
> i have lots of tools for improving diff, but this intermingling
> problem is a showstopper in some cases, like right now where i have
> spent months trying to make sense of months of changes to org files
> that have not been entered into git.  i.e. i did not enter every few

Well, "months of changes" seems tough.  I sometimes (rarely) have to
enter 2 days' worth of changes...  It requires discipline, but
discipline pays off in /so many areas of life/...

> days as normal.  i find reviewing changes to be valuable.  every once
> in a while i discover data corruption or something that i forgot etc.

Yes, same here.

> i wonder if diff, or difftastic, could be taught or postprocessed to
> do merely one thing: try to preserve stuff between "^\\*+ ".  that is
> probably too optimistic, but imagine a --preserve-between option.

I afraid so.  Difftastic does not support Org mode format.  However, the
tree-sitter page claims that Org parser is under way, so there's hope
(AFAIK difftastic uses tree-sitter under the hood).

Best,
mbork

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl