[RFC] Interactive difftool

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

On  0, Ping Yin [off-list ref] wrote:

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

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 10:51 PM, David Aguilar [off-list ref] wrote:

On  0, Ping Yin [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

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.

We can just change git-difftool.perl

The easiest way is first parsing the output of git diff --stat,
adding the number at the beginning, for example
[1] diff.c                   |   10 +++++++++-
[2] t/t4020-diff-external.sh |    8 ++++++++

When the user types a number,  git-difftool-helper is launched to show
the diff for the corresponding file.

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:23:15PM +0800, Ping Yin wrote:

We can just change git-difftool.perl

The easiest way is first parsing the output of git diff --stat,
adding the number at the beginning, for example
[1] diff.c                   |   10 +++++++++-
[2] t/t4020-diff-external.sh |    8 ++++++++

I am not paying enough attention to this thread to comment on your
overall goal, but instead of parsing "--stat", try "--numstat".

-Peff

On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 3:32 PM, Jeff King [off-list ref] wrote:

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:23:15PM +0800, Ping Yin wrote:

quoted

We can just change git-difftool.perl

The easiest way is first parsing the output of git diff --stat,
adding the number at the beginning, for example
[1] diff.c                   |   10 +++++++++-
[2] t/t4020-diff-external.sh |    8 ++++++++

I am not paying enough attention to this thread to comment on your
overall goal, but instead of parsing "--stat", try "--numstat".

Thanks, that helps.