Re: [PATCH v2] commit, status: #comment diff output in verbose mode

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 09:49:30AM +0100, Michael J Gruber wrote:

> > I do still think I prefer the "#" as comment lines, though. Editors
> > understand that concept pretty well. For example, one thing that happens
> > to me a lot is that I write a paragraph, then edit it, then ask the
> > editor to re-wrap it. Inevitably it buts against the "#" lines, and
> > those get re-wrapped, too. I could fix it, of course, but I don't bother
> > because the editor knows that the stuff on "#" lines should remain on
> > "#" lines. So as it is now, the git-status output gets scrambled, but I
> > don't have to care. With a special "# Lines below this one..." line, I
> > will have mangled it and get extra cruft in my commit message.
> 
> As long as we match for the first n characters of that line with n<60 or
> so the rewrapping will do no harm (assuming you leave it to start a new
> paragraph, i.e. "^#Lines..." stays "^#Lines...").

Yeah, that would work in my case.

> > But I admit that this is one pretty bizarre personal anecdote and might
> > not affect anyone else.
> 
> What affects me more is when when I track files in a different encoding
> (latin1, say), the diff triggers that encoding for vim and I end up with
> encoding issues for the commit message (which is supposed to be utf8)...

Yuck. You may be literally feeding different charsets into a single
buffer of the editor. The best you could do is something like:

  au BufNewFile,BufRead COMMIT_EDITMSG set fenc=utf-8

and then for an empty commit message, vim will read in the latin1, and
then convert it to utf-8 on output. You will not have munged the "diff"
line, so git will still recognize it and remove everything after. But if
you are amending, then you will feed it a utf-8 commit message along
with a latin1 diff. And vim will screw that up when reading it in.

-Peff