Re: What's your favourite *under_publicized* editing feature ofEmacs?

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> For Emacs (and such) this may be the way to go and is welcome.
> For git (and such) however it may be preferable to have generic diff/
> merge plugin capability; specifically for 'xml-container' formats like
> odt and docx  but also more generically.

Versioning documents in formats like odt is indeed a different issue:
for diffs and merges you don't want to do it at the line-level of
course, but neither do you necessarily want to do it at the XML level
itself: maybe automatic merging can be done at the XML level, but when
conflicts or diffs need to be shown to users, they have to be shown in
terms that the user can understand and most users have no idea about
odt's underlying XML representation other than that it exists.  So you
need something like OpenOffice to do the diff for you.

> Personal note: I use nted
> http://vsr.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/~jan/nted/nted.xhtml
> to enter music and I have a hell of a time versioning and diffing.

Right: since this uses WYSIWYG you basically get the same problem: only
nted can do the diff and merge-conflict display in a way that can make
sense to the user.
If you care about revision control, you're generally better off without
WYSIWYG (I tend to think you're better off without it in any
circumstance, but that's a different discussion ;-).


        Stefan