Git add --patch does not use diff-so-fancy

[mrageh]

Hi

Not sure if this is the correct place for this issue.

Just started using this npm package and it's great, it makes reading diffs in my terminal great.

However when I use git add --patch it uses the old style diff to display each chunk that's about to be staged.

Is git add --patch not supposed to use diff under the hood, which is now diff-so-fancy?

Is there anything we can do to use diff-so-fancy with git add --patch?

Thanks

[paulirish]

Someone else pinged me about this a month ago. I'm not sure.

Based on https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/git-add--interactive.perl#L747-L768 it doesn't look good.

But i'd love to be proven wrong. There's a lot of mention of color in here, so there may be SOME configurability, but not sure if we can intercept with a pager or something.

[paulirish]

There's some other people who were poking around this:

http://www.nickcoding.com/2014/10/30/making-git-prose-friendly/
http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Different-diff-strategies-in-add-interactive-td7588815.html

.. which my unveil some solutions.

[mrageh]

Thanks for the swift response @paulirish, would it be worth leaving this issue open or do you think we should close it?

[paulirish]

Leave it open. It still requires some research to see if it's possible or not.

[tonekk]

👍 was just going to add the same issue

[danielcompton]

git commit --verbose doesn't use it either.

[hultberg]

As @danielcompton pointed out, git commit -v does not use diff-so-fancy.

[paulirish]

The solution here appears to be to fork $brewdir/Cellar/git/2.7.0/libexec/git-core/git-add--interactive and make some edits.

I don't see a cleaner way to configure this.

[hultberg]

We could open a feature request to git itself and see if we could get a config for this?

[paulirish]

We could open a feature request to git itself and see if we could get a config for this?

Yup, we'll need to get this supported upstream in git core first.

---

@peff I think you're the right person to help us out. First of all, thank you. This project has been a big success mostly due to your work on diff-highlight.

You can read the above issue for context, but it appears we are lacking support in git-core for a key area. We'd like to propose, I think, that add--interactive can support a configurable pager. Mostly, we want a hook to run diff-highlight and our tool while add--interactive is printing hunks. Does this make sense to you, and does it sound possible?

[OJFord]

Please forgive me for asking the obvious - I'm sure others have a firmer grasp of it than I do - but perhaps it's best to get a note of it anyway.

Does a configurable pager make sense for add--interactive in any context other than diff-so-fancy or similar tool?

For example, most have pager set to less (plus some options) or maybe vim. How does this make sense for multiple fragments? I'm not sure it would be desirable to jump in and out. I think what's needed (that is, desired) is an option separate to PAGER, which does some formatting prior to the pager or interactive prompt and pipes on through.

Ultimately this would mean that whether interactive or not, diff-so-fancy could do it's thing before the pager or the interactive prompt, and would not require modifying the PAGER from default setup at all; perhaps this would be something like FORMATTER=diff-so-fancy. Or have I misunderstood?