Re: [OT] org and diff

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2022-12-28, at 03:30, Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com> wrote:

> hi marcin,
>
> thanks for your blog post on my crash-proof editing idea.

You're welcome! :-)  In fact, it was an interesting exercise.

>
> more below
>
> On 12/17/22, Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> wrote:
>>
>> On 2022-12-17, at 03:06, Samuel Wales <samologist@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> marcin> One question I'd ask is: how important a legible diff is to
>>> you?  I keep my Org files in Git, too, but if /I/ know what was
>>> changed, I just don't care about diff going nuts and I treat it as
>>> (more or less) Git's internal implementation detail.
>>>
>>> for org, i mostly use git for reviewing changes.  it is only one step
>>> more sophisticated than saving old and diffing.
>>>
>>> i have lots of tools for improving diff, but this intermingling
>
> [n.b. i have an still unpubolished package for 30 years that
> postprocesses diff and is extremely powerful, and it can if you are
> reviewing an ientire repo changes, to some degree nullify the
> intermingling issue, but its integration with magit, and magit's bugs
> with intra-hunk staging [2 bugs ime], make the intermingling an issue.
> with no bugs, less of an issue, mnerely because it is desirable to use
> magit instead of merely reviewing it and intra-hunk staging [and
> killing] is part of that.  but i use old magit, with --- +++, istead
> of new magit, which does not supply headers.  idk if new magit fixes
> the bugs.
>
> so really i was askig about the intermingling issue and whetehr it
> could be mitigated at the magit/git level.]
>
>> Well, "months of changes" seems tough.  I sometimes (rarely) have to
>> enter 2 days' worth of changes...  It requires discipline, but
>> discipline pays off in /so many areas of life/...
>
> not sure what you men to say in this case about discipline.  my
> circumstances if i told you about you'd be surprised.  my physical
> survival is very much at issue and i have no  support for dalin with
> it.
>
> i.e. not sure if this was aimed at me or a general comment, and the
> emphasis i wasn't sure what it was referring to.

General comment.  I meant that committing my changes (almost) every day
requires serious discipline, and I worked pretty hard to acquire it.
Also, I do not claim that everyone can learn it like me - people are
/very/ different...

OTOH, you might consider "outsourcing the discipline".  One way would be
to set up some kind of reminder to review/commit the changes every day.
(That's more or less what I did, though I used a heavy-weight type of
reminder: https://www.beeminder.com/ .)  Another could be to use some
tool to do the committing for you (see
e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/q/420143/1181665), though then you lose
the "review" part.  (Still, with tools like `git log --grep' and/or `git
blame' you might find that this is good enough.)

Hth,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl