Re: [PATCH] add-patch: response to invalid option

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 16, 2024, 15:22 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqr0f5fi2b.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <64d4ba8e-0dfe-407c-9b32-d02f1ce40393@gmail.com>

Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

>> That flow of thought makes sort-of sense, if the choices that are
>> offered are too numerous (say, around a dozen or more), but with the
>> current command set, I am not sure if this change is an improvement
>> (note: I did not say "I do not think that"---I simply am not sure).
>
> The complete list of help is 15 lines long (we don't always print
> everything but if you're in the middle of staging several hunks from
> the same file we do)

Ah, OK. Even though I was the one who stole this feature from elsewhere, I forgot that we had that many commands, and it makes the decision a lot simpler ;-)

Show 18 quoted lines

>   y - stage this hunk
>   n - do not stage this hunk
>   q - quit; do not stage this hunk or any of the remaining ones
>   a - stage this hunk and all later hunks in the file
>   d - do not stage this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
>   j - leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
>   J - leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
>   k - leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
>   K - leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
>   g - select a hunk to go to
>   / - search for a hunk matching the given regex
>   s - split the current hunk into smaller hunks
>   e - manually edit the current hunk
>   p - print the current hunk
>   ? - print help
>
> I find it long enough to be annoying as it means there is a
> significant distance between the prompt and the hunk text.

Yes, I now agree.

So the log message may want a bit of rewrite in the title and the introductory part, with a clarification that '?' is what we already had and not what this adds (from Patrick's comment), and there may be other small improvements we want to see that I may have missed, but other than these small-ish points, the basic direction of this patch is good?

This is a tangent, but I think we _mostly_ take these commands case insensitively (e.g., you can say 'Q' to quit the program, as well as 'q' that is listed above). But 'k' and 'j' (there may be others) act differently when given in the uppercase. This would limit our ability to later add capitalized variant of an already used lower case letter without retraining users---should we find it disturbing, or is "add -p" mostly done and we do not have to worry?

Thanks.