Re: Tweaking magit/diff mode to be more helpful in text editing

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 02:49:35PM +0800, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> What I'd really like is to find a way [...] of only showing the
>> actual edits, not the filling [...]
>
> You mean a diff which works at whole paragraph level instead of
> at line level, as if the whole paragraph were a big honkin' line?

Yup, that's exactly it. I'm also just considering the dumb kludge of
clobbering Magit's deffaces. That wouldn't solve any of the other
issues, though.

> The "word processors" seem to "see" texts in this way. With
> Emacs we are in a somewhat schizophrenic spot. You might try
> actually having one-line paragraphs and use visual-line mode
> with word wrapping; be warned that many an Emacs algorithm
> doesn't like extremely long lines (they work, but they let
> you notice their distaste :-)

I've tried visual-line-mode before, and didn't like it too much.

I just found wdiff[1]! This looks to be exactly what I want, and it's
got the right brand, too :) There's also something called adiff.

I've installed it, and tweaked my git config so that I can call "git
difftool --tool=wdiff" and see the diff using wdiff. Right now it spits
out the whole file, not just changes-plus-context, but presumably I can
figure out how to change that.

I suppose I might be able to fool with Magit so that it displays diffs
using the wdiff difftool, but probably I should just write some sort of
standalone mode for doing this display.

But then I'd still want to write git integration, to diff against the
index...

Are any of the Magit developers here? How hard would it be to add wdiff
display as a sort of paste-on command to Magit? Obviously the diffs
themselves can't be fed to git in any useful way, but it would be great
to just have a command that compares commits using wdiff...

Progress!

E

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/wdiff/