Using magit style diffing generally - emacs

I enjoy using magit and whenever I have to look at a diff outside of magit, it
occurs to me how inferior the default diff experience is.
Two aspects in particular:
1) refine diff automatically as I move into new hunks.
- diff-auto-refine-mode is not a substitute because I don't always move
with M-p and M-n.
2) white space differences are really obvious because
magit-whitespace-warning-face face is applied.
Is there a way to get these two features in diff-mode

I think sending a message to the Magit maintainers asking them to submit those changes for inclusion in diff-mode might do it.

Related

customizing emacs with "sidebars"

I'm tinkering about switching my IDE to emacs. (I'm still an emacs newbie.)
The problem is that I customized my IDE quite well and I'd regret to leave my helpers behind.
Let me explain:
Shows the current open files/buffers, allows fast switching with a hotkey (C-1, C-2, ...)
Shows the most recent texts on the "clipboard" or inserted by complete (no. 4), text insertable with a hotkey (C-b 1, C-b 2, ...) Last inserted shown in bold, insertable with C-`
The last inserted complete (no. 4) text, insertable with M-`
Autocomplete-ish list, gathered from all open files, regardless of their type with some magical logic. text insertable with a hotkey (M-1, M-2, ...)
I guess emacs has such features, but I'm a visual type I'd like to see what I have available.
Of course actual hotkeys don't matter much, but as you see having all that info visible makes it easy to hit the spot with the least keypresses.
My pain is that there is a plethora of emacs extensions providing various features, checking all seems to take a lifetime.
My question is:
are there any emacs extensions to achieve similar looks and behavour?
as I'm a programmer, which extensions could I take as a base to assemble something like this?
Thanks!
Elaborating a bit more:
I’m a python dev, so most of the code I’m writing is python. Add some HTML JS CSS XML to the picture.
One important thing is that completion needs to work across filetype boundaries, because python / HTML(template) / XML(config) / doctest identifiers are cross-referenced. It’s a huge pain with some IDEs that completion works only for python filetypes.
I have a lot of same named files but in different folders, like init.py, configure.zcml, etc. It seems to be a pain to switch between those by filename.
Better said that’s a list of recently inserted text. To be reused by the fewest keys as possible. Usually when coding I’m reusing the same identifiers/whatever within the same task. So it’s handy to have them listed instead having to retype the starting x chars to get completion again.
Usually best use of this feature is when changing/refactoring code. Like adding one more extra feature and the identifier is needed several times over the place.
TL;DR
Learn keyboard macros. Learn yasnippet.
Autocomplete mode is probably similar to what you have.
Get acquainted with emacs kill-ring before trying to change it, it wants to be your friend. Then you'll know what to look for when you DO want to change it.
Long Version
Shows the current open files/buffers, allows fast switching with a hotkey (C-1, C-2, ...)
You have three options for this.
My personal preference is to have all source files open at all times. So I don't need a visual list of open buffers. Whenever I want to switch to a file I hit C-= (which I've bound to iswitchb-buffer) and type a couple of unique letters. It's common to constantly switch between the same two buffers so I also bound C-backspace to previous-buffer.
Another option I can recommend is tabbar. It's not exactly like your setup, but it displays a list of open buffers (just like webpages in a browser) and it has functions for cycling through the tabs, so it shouldn't be hard to reproduce your C-number key bindings.
You could use speedbar or ecb. They would be the most similar to your current visual configuration, but I'd argue the other options are more efficient.
Shows the most recent texts on the "clipboard" or inserted by complete (no. 4), text insertable with a hotkey (C-b 1, C-b 2, ...) Last inserted shown in bold, insertable with...
I see you've sort of mixed the clipboard with completion history. When it comes to emacs, yasnippet and autocomplete are just so good you're better off going with them for completion (see below).
Emacs clipboard is called the kill-ring. I'm sure you know of C-y and M-y, so you can always recover anything you've cut in the past. Unfortunately, I don't know of any packages that constantly display the kill ring or allow you to yank a specific part of it (though that shouldn't be too hard to write), but at least you know what to search for (kill-ring).
The last inserted complete (no. 4) text, insertable with M-`
I'll be honest, I don't see that much use in this. If you have to repetitively insert text, you should learn keyboard macros. In fact, you should learn keyboard macros anyway, they're the first reason I got hooked to emacs.
Autocomplete-ish list, gathered from all open files, regardless of their type with some magical logic. text insertable with a hotkey (M-1, M-2, ...)
Emacs had many great completion options. In your case, the best one is probably autocomplete-mode. It pops-up completion options (much like your separate completions window), and I think it allows for quick selection of a specific option (like your M-number shortcuts). Also it has several different ways of deciding which completions to offer you (it calls them "sources") and one of them is to gather from all buffers.
In addition to that you have yasnippet, and I couldn't possibly recommend it enough. Seriously. Learning to use it and writing your own snippets will change the way you write code. You'll become a mage whose fingers produce pages of code flowing through your screen in blazing speeds. Use yasnippet!
Once you have it configured, every 3 or 4 keys you press will generate a line (or more) of code for you.
After all that, if you still miss something from your previous editor you'll write it yourself. :-)
Your setup looks exactly like https://github.com/emacsmirror/ecb.
To me at least, since I don't use side-bars:)
You should take a look at the extension speedbar. I have installed this extension, but I rarely use it even for a very large project.

Splitting a hunk with magit

I have 2 edits very close by (and therefore part of the same hunk), that I'd like to commit separately. Is it possible to split a hunk from within magit?
You can set the mark correctly with Ctrl+Space (C-SPC) and magit will only commit the selected portion.
You can also use - and + to decrease or increase the extent of the hunks in the diff (and 0 resets), but dominikh's answer is the most important one to know about.
Magit reuse diff-mode but don't expose many of diff-mode commands in its magit-revision-mode as this does VC package.
For example you can call diff-split-hunk which is usually C-c C-s in diff-mode.

emacs magit diff highlighting

I'm just getting started with magit.
I really like it, except that the diff viewer is really annoying to me. The chunk highlighting makes no sense because as I scroll around the cursor moves with the screen, highlighting new regions. There is also no other syntax highlighting in the magit diff mode. Does anybody know how to disable the chunk highlighting and get better diff colours other than white on gray?
Thanks.
This is an issue with Magit in combination with Emacs standard theme "wombat".
To work around this, do
M-x customize
Search for magit-item-highlight, click Show All Attributes, uncheck Inherit, then Save and Apply (or maybe only apply).
You lose the highlighting of the current hunk of the diff, but you can tell that still from the hunk's heading anyway, so it was somewhat redundant. Otherwise it resolves the issue nicely.
The zone highlighted correspond to the stash that would be staged when you hit "s".
Inside the hunk, the diff should be colored. You could test the development version (see https://github.com/magit/magit), and if this doesn't solve your issue, add comment in https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/133 about your configuration and exact problem.
There should be a customize group magit which allows you to customize all the different faces for the diff viewer.
In other words, you can run
M-x customize-group RET magit-faces RET
to see a list of all the faces used by Magit. The ones relevant to the diff viewer are, of course, the ones starting with Magit Diff.
Simply customize away and select Apply and Save. Alternatively, you can just use the Customize interface to see what faces are available, and then set them directly using set-face-foreground, set-face-background, and so on in your init-file.
If you're running the latest 1.0 version, you can also navigate to any of the diff chunks, hit the 'e' key to get an ediff presentation of the differences.
If you don't want to try M-x customize for some reason, simply place the following snippet in your init.el
(defun disable-magit-highlight-in-buffer ()
(face-remap-add-relative 'magit-item-highlight '()))
(add-hook 'magit-status-mode-hook 'disable-magit-highlight-in-buffer)
Source: https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/133

Why isn't return bound to newline-and-indent by default on emacs

I have tried emacs on and off for a while now and every time I start emacs, I go through the same routine. Customizing. The first one is binding return to newline-and-indent. (g)Vim does this by default. Showing matching parenthesis is also done by default on (g)Vim. It is grea that I can customize emacs to my heart's content but why doesn't emacs have nice and easy defaults? For reference, I am now using Emacs 23 on a RHEL5 box.
Probably because RMS didn't want it, that and because changing long-standing defaults is just an issue of politics. Like vi, Emacs has a hard-core following and basic changes like these are minefields.
Note: if you saved your customizations, then you wouldn't have to re-do them every time...
To have those nice and easy defaults, install Emacs Starter Kit. It enables by default a bunch of useful and convenient features make even the advanced Emacs users more productive.
Otherwise, as TJ pointed out, Emacs Customization Mode (type M-x customize) allows you to save permanently any of the settings. You can even store them in a separate file from your dotemacs―(setq custom-file "~/.emacs-custom.el")―so you can use it in every computer you work on.
The title of your question doesn't really reflect what your question is (and has been answered by Trey and Torok), but I'll tell you why I like it being bound to just newline: useless whitespace. Say you are nested inside a conditional in a function etc. and hit return a couple times to leave a blank line. The blank line now has a bunch of space chars on it. Yes, you can (and I do) remove trailing whitespace before saving, but I also have visual whitespace mode on and I can see it there taunting me.

Make Emacs less aggressive about indentation

Emacs reindents the current line whenever I type certain things, like ";" or "//". This is pretty annoying, since there are a whole lot of places where it isn't smart enough to indent correctly.
How do I disable this feature? I still want to be able to indent the line with TAB, but I don't want any source code I type to cause it to reindent.
(I'm using Dylan Moonfire's C# mode, but this probably applies to any cc-mode.)
Try running c-toggle-electric-state to turn off the electric action of these characters.
You can do this as part of a c-mode-common-hook, or toggle the state manually by hitting C-c C-l.
most likely caused by the inline-and-indent 'feature' of c-mode and derivatives. emacswiki has several solutions.