2019-05-05 A few Magit tips

A month ago I wrote about merging in Git without actually comitting the changes, and mentioned that you probably can’t do that from within Magit. It turned out that I was wrong – in fact, Magit can do it.

More recently, I wrote about another Git tip, which is staging an empty file. Then, Nicolas Petton asked whether it’s possible in Magit, and lo and behold – it is, in a quite intuitive (and documented in the docstring) way I just didn’t think about.

And much earlier I wrote about displaying more detailed information about your Git stashes, which prompted an anonymous comment about doing the same in Magit. Since then, I also learned how to make this the default – now I have this:

(setq magit-status-margin
  '(t "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M " magit-log-margin-width t 18))

in my init.el.

Well, the takeaway is probably that Magit really delivers on its promise to be “a Git porcelain inside Emacs”. The only thing I really miss in Magit is a simple way to use it (and Emacs) as a standalone Git frontend, for these poor people accustomed to toy text-editors instead of the real thing. ;-)

CategoryEnglish, CategoryBlog, CategoryEmacs, CategoryGit