gitk: add "grep diff" selection criterion (Re: find commit adding/removing could use changing option)

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 16, 2010, 17:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20100716172806.GA15491@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <D163BB49BCC4479AB3E4BA4F87826184@csmith>

Hi Chris,

Chris Smith wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> One thing I find myself wishing for is the ability to find a line that has
> been modified by using gitk. It seems to me that if I have the following in a
> diff
> 
> - def foo(this)
> + def foo(this, that=False)
> 
> that I can't find the line by searching for foo.

Ah, so you want a cousin to ‘log -S’ that /does/ search through diffs. See [1].

As that thread explains, it is doable from the commandline already, though not in a nicely packaged form. But what about from gitk?

A possible hack would be to teach gitk to add arbitrary criteria to the end of the ‘git diff-tree’ command line[2]. In this case, the criterion would be ‘| search-diff $term’, where search-diff is a script something like the following:

 #!/bin/sh
 while read -r commit
 do
	if
		git diff-tree -p -c "$commit" | grep -q "$@"
	then
		printf '%s\n' "$commit"
	fi
 done

If that proves useful, afterwards one could teach ‘diff-tree’ to do the check itself, which would allow commands like

 git log --search-diff=foo

too.

Thoughts? Jonathan

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/122478 [2] You can find the code one would need to touch for this by searching for gdtargs and gdttype in the gitk script.