Re: [RFC] Interactive difftool

From: David Aguilar <davvid@gmail.com>
Date: Mar 27, 2009, 14:51 UTC
Message-ID: <20090327145122.GA944@gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <46dff0320903260829j34d8c613wf9b4fcc954c8519a@mail.gmail.com>

On  0, Ping Yin <pkufranky@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 22 quoted lines

> Before git-difftool goes to master, i want to propose a new feature to
> add to or replace the current behaviour of difftool. With current
> difftool, we can only see the diff one by one. However, sometimes what
> we want is to see the diff of selected files, or in a different order,
> just like what we can do in the gui. So here is what i propose
> 
> $ git difftool --interactive [options]
> [1] diff.c                   |   10 +++++++++-
> [2] t/t4020-diff-external.sh |    8 ++++++++
> Choose the file you want to see the diff of: 2
> 
> When the user types 2 and then <enter>, the external diff program is called
> 
> Further more, instead of just type a number, a letter can be prepended
> to the number to represent different ways of diff. For example
> 
> t2 (tool 2): see the diff for file 2 with the configured diff tool
> p2 (patch 2): see the diff for file 2 in the patch format
> 
> What do you think?
> 
> Ping Yin

That would be pretty cool. I don't know about the merge-to-master timing and whether we'd want to include new features before the move.

I guess most of the work would have to be done in git-difftool-helper.sh. I had a co-worker that asked for this exact feature just the other day (and ditto for mergetool).

Patches are welcome if you have an idea for how it could work. Right now we get called indirectly by git-diff so I don't know if there's an easy way to hook into it like that. It might be a matter of changing git-difftool.perl so that it does more of the dispatching itself.

-- 
	David