Any way to edit the file in index directly?

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

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

Ping Yin

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

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

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

On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 10:10:41PM -0400, Jeff King wrote:

Hmm, actually maybe you are thinking of:

  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/103389

which I even reviewed, but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere after that.

-Peff

Ping Yin

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Sometimes by 'add -p', i can't get what i want (the patch will fail to apply when exiting editor). And with 'add -p', i can't get a global view of all changes together

By "aloneside" i mean i can open the index and worktree file in diff mode side by side for easily editing.

Thanks, That's what i want.

Ping Yin, 08.04.2009:

This is possible with git-difftool from the contrib/ area, but without editing the index file. But I think "worktree" is called "worktree" for a good reason.

Markus

Hi,

On Tue, 7 Apr 2009, Jeff King wrote:

I posted a patch for "git add --edit", which allows you to edit the _diff_ between the working directory and the index, and which applies the result using apply --recount.

But that has nothing to do with "editing the index directly".

But you might want to use a combination of "hash-object -w --stdin" and "update-index --cacheinfo". IOW something like

	sha1=$(echo Hello | git hash-object -w --stdin) &&
	git update-index --cacheinfo 0644 $sha1 my-file

However, Ping, I _strongly_ suspect an X-Y problem here. IOW I think you are asking about specifics of a certain _solution_, while we probably have a better solution for your particular _problem_.

Hth, Dscho

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Thanks. I think 'add --edit' is just what i meant by saying 'add -e'. I'll have it a try.