Re: Any way to edit the file in index directly?

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 8, 2009, 02:10 UTC
Message-ID: <20090408021041.GB18244@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <46dff0320904071803k68fddff4j226760392e0c5bcc@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 09:03:03AM +0800, Ping Yin wrote:

> There seems to be a patch for this ( add -e?), but i forget where to
> find it.

"add -p" has an "e"dit option for editing the patch. I don't recall any way of directly editing the content.

> For a big change, instead of "add -p", it may be easier to edit the
> index directly ( with the corresponding worktree file alongside)

I'm not sure what you mean by "alongside". If you mean "by editing a temporary file that corresponds to the index file without munging your worktree file", then you can do:

  FILE=foo.c
  git show :$FILE >$FILE.tmp
  $EDITOR $FILE.tmp
  object=`git hash-object -w $FILE.tmp`
  git update-index --cacheinfo 100644 $object $FILE

And obviously you could make a script for that if you wanted (but at the very least, you would need quotes to handle files with spaces, and probably some magic to handle smudge/clean filters and CRLF properly for the tempfile).

-Peff