Re: [RFC PATCH] git-add--interactive: manual hunk editing mode v2

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jun 5, 2008, 09:20 UTC
Message-ID: <20080605092016.GA16748@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <200806051105.02802.trast@student.ethz.ch>

On Thu, Jun 05, 2008 at 11:04:58AM +0200, Thomas Rast wrote:

> (Somehow it seems rather ironic that I'm trying to implement a feature
> that provides plenty of live bullets, yet keep shooting myself with
> the _MUA_.)

Heh.

> I should have provided a definition, sorry.  By "your" scheme, I meant
> the one where one is restricted to deleting existing lines, and thus
> deletes '-' lines to disable them; by "my" scheme, where one is free
> to edit and changes '-' lines to context to disable them.

OK, thanks for the clarification.

Show 5 quoted lines

> At least it's my current understanding that, under the above
> definition, "your" scheme is what you actually proposed in
>   http://www.spinics.net/lists/git/msg67478.html
>   [why doesn't Google find gmane?]
> but I misunderstood and implemented "my" scheme.

For the record, "my" scheme was only half thought-through, and I think I actually like "your" scheme better. Once we give the user an editor, restricting them to a tiny subset of editor operations seems error-prone and annoying, since we have no way of enforcing those operations except to wait until after they edit and say "oops, you did something bad."

> [Let's just forget about the original patch at the top of the thread;
> in retrospect, it _is_ clunky, and the UI didn't get any replies in
> favour.]

It seems like Junio isn't all that keen on the raw patch-editing interface. And even if we do like it, I think there is still room for a less error-prone but more restrictive feature that mere mortals can use. So maybe there is a better interface yet.

What about 'S' to do a "line split"; that is, take the current hunk, and anywhere there are adjacent changed lines, split them into their own hunks. I.e. the hunk,

   line 1
  +line 2
  -line 3
   line 4
  -line 5

becomes three hunks:

   line 1
  +line 2

  -line 3
   line 4

  -line 5

and then we proceed as usual, staging or not each split hunk. It would be clunky to separate one or two lines from a huge chunk (since you would inadvertently split the huge chunk and have to stage each individually). But in many cases you can split into smaller hunks first with 's'.

-Peff