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Re: Highlighting word diffs
From: |
Stefan Monnier |
Subject: |
Re: Highlighting word diffs |
Date: |
Sat, 18 Apr 2015 12:46:41 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux) |
> I would expect the [-text-] bits to be coloured red, and {+text+} bits
> to be coloured green. That's what I get in the terminal with:
> $ git diff --word-diff
> Does that help?
Yes, thank you.
> Is there support for this?
No, there isn't so far.
> If not, would it be a valid feature request?
Of course.
Looking at your sample output I can't see any indication that diff-mode
could use to detect that "word-diff" was used. Also "diff --word-diff
a b" tells me that this option is not supported, so either it's a new
feature in recent diffutils or (more likely) it's specific to Git.
Also "git diff --help" tells me:
plain
Show words as [-removed-] and {+added+}. Makes no attempts to
escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the
output may be ambiguous.
so making diff-mode highlight [-<foo>-] specially might lead to
completely broken highlighting if the file contains "[-" or "-]".
So, the best options to get reliable highlighting in diff-mode would be
either --word-diff=color (and then process the output to turn the color
escape sequence into faces) or --word-diff=porcelain and then
post-process the output to hide the extra stuff.
For example, applying
(while (re-search-forward "\n\\(?:[-+ ]\\|\\(~\\)\n\\)" nil t)
(let ((m (if (match-end 1) 1 0)))
(put-text-property (match-beginning 0) (match-end m) 'invisible t)))
to the body of each hunk (in porcelain format) results in acceptable
display (basically equivalent to word-diff=color). But of course,
there's a lot more work to be done for actual support (e.g. for
diff-goto-source, diff-apply-hunk, diff-reverse-direction, ...).
Stefan