On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 11:19:49AM +1200, Sam Vilain wrote: > Thanks for that, it mostly works, however it doesn't seem to notice if I > abort without making the merge complete (on emacs21). In my smartmerge > script (http://utsl.gen.nz/scripts/smartmerge) I detect this condition > based on the presence of merge markers, possibly dubious but pragmatic. Hmm, well, here's a way of fixing it. (See attached, below.) It adds a new command 'x', which when you hit it in the ediff control window, exits with a error status of '1', indicating that the merge has failed. This is something which emerge, kdiff3, tkdiff, et. al all support; but which ediff doesn't. > I still don't really understand why having to save the merged buffer and > exit is such a huge issue. Already I have to select "-t emerge" to get > emerge. I would have thought it would be better to just make the other > mode available, and let the user figure it out. I'm just exploring alternatives. Basically, it just seems interesting that ediff has a lot of nice features, but also has some incredibly user-hostile features. The first time I tried using ediff, I indeed tried saving the buffer and exiting it. That's when I discovered that after I changed the focus to the merge window and saved it, when I tried typing ^X^C, the exit failed with the error message "Attempt to delete a surrogate minibuffer frame". That's the sort of thing that will cause non-elisp programmers to run screaming off into the distance. So if you are going to save the merge the buffer and exit, you *have* to use the 'q' command, and endure the loads of stupid questions issued by ediff, OR, you can discover that ^X^C in the ediff control window doesn't actually cause emacs to exit, but it does make the ediff control window go away. (Which is another insane bit of ediff's UI design... why should ^X^C do something completely different in the ediff control window?!?) So yeah, we can add ediff as an optional support that people have to explicitly request, but quite frankly, having played with it, I don't know why anyone would use it without a huge number of fix ups, which is why I was trying to make ediff actually be usable for someone who doesn't mind typing ^X^C twice, for no good reason, after figuring out that this illogical thing is what you actually need to do to exit ediff. (I actually read the help text first, so I got treated to the really annoying ediff-quit behavior before I figured out the double ^X^C trick.) - Ted ;; use-ediff-instead.el ;; ;; This emacs lisp snippet should be placed in your .emacs.el file in ;; order to use the ediff package instead of emerge for git-mergetool. ;; Ediff has more whiz-bang features, but unfortunately it doesn't ;; integrate well with shell scripts that try to invoke ediff from an ;; emacs shell invocation. This script tries to address these problems. (defun ediff-write-merge-buffer () (let ((file ediff-merge-store-file)) (set-buffer ediff-buffer-C) (write-region (point-min) (point-max) file) (message "Merge buffer saved in: %s" file) (set-buffer-modified-p nil) (sit-for 1))) (defun ediff-abort () "Abort the ediff session without a non-zero exit status" (interactive) (kill-emacs 1)) (defun ediff-setup-abort () (define-key ediff-mode-map "x" 'ediff-abort)) (defun emerge-files-command () (let ((file-a (nth 0 command-line-args-left)) (file-b (nth 1 command-line-args-left)) (file-out (nth 2 command-line-args-left))) (setq command-line-args-left (nthcdr 3 command-line-args-left)) (setq ediff-quit-hook 'kill-emacs ediff-quit-merge-hook 'ediff-write-merge-buffer ediff-keymap-setup-hook 'ediff-setup-abort) (ediff-merge-files file-a file-b nil file-out))) (defun emerge-files-with-ancestor-command () (let (file-a file-b file-anc file-out) ;; check for a -a flag, for filemerge compatibility (if (string= (car command-line-args-left) "-a") ;; arguments are "-a ancestor file-a file-b file-out" (progn (setq file-a (nth 2 command-line-args-left)) (setq file-b (nth 3 command-line-args-left)) (setq file-anc (nth 1 command-line-args-left)) (setq file-out (nth 4 command-line-args-left)) (setq command-line-args-left (nthcdr 5 command-line-args-left))) ;; arguments are "file-a file-b ancestor file-out" (setq file-a (nth 0 command-line-args-left)) (setq file-b (nth 1 command-line-args-left)) (setq file-anc (nth 2 command-line-args-left)) (setq file-out (nth 3 command-line-args-left)) (setq command-line-args-left (nthcdr 4 command-line-args-left))) (setq ediff-quit-hook 'kill-emacs ediff-quit-merge-hook 'ediff-write-merge-buffer ediff-keymap-setup-hook 'ediff-setup-abort) (ediff-merge-files-with-ancestor file-a file-b file-anc nil file-out))) ;; End of use-ediff-instead.el - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
