¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

It’s possible to do git patch -p to review diff hunks interactively, one by one.

Can we accomplish something similar with git diff? If not, is there a tool that can accomplish that, in the same spirit of git patch -p, but with a read-only-centric workflow?

The naïve approach is to simply run git patch -p and then press ’n’ (no) for each diff hunk. It does not feel particularly effective though.

I found another way, which embodies the spirit of git patch -p more effectively: tig status.

I already use tig every once in a while but wasn’t aware that it could do that.

I won’t try to illustrate the command output here (it’s a TUI); simply give it a try the next time you run git diff or git add.

It’s also possible to stage per file and per hunk changes in the TUI. This operation mode somewhats resemble git-crecord:

git subcommand to interactively select changes to commit or stage

…which I packaged to the Arch User Repository a long time ago, but ended up barely using it. Let’s see whether tig status will stick.