Magit: Copy text from Stage section without character "+"

Question

^{Windows 10, Emacs 25.1, Magit}

I select some text (Shift + Arrow Down) from the Unstaged changes section. Here is a screenshot:

Then I paste into another buffer (*scratch*).

This is the result:

Is it possible to strip the leading +s when killing lines from diff hunks?

Answer 1

Magit doesn't support that currently, but it should be doable. I'll probably do that soon. I sometimes could use that feature too.

Meanwhile use a macro to replace the +s after yanking: <f3> C-d C-n <f4>....

Answer 2

Until Magit supports something like this, the behavior is easy to get with a custom command. I have something similar to the following command in my configuration. If you call it with a prefix argument, it will remove the leading diff markers.

(defun km/magit-copy-region-hunk (&optional no-column)
  (interactive "P")
  (when (magit-section-internal-region-p)
    (magit-section-when hunk
      (deactivate-mark)
      (let ((text (buffer-substring-no-properties
                   (region-beginning) (region-end))))
        (kill-new (if no-column
                      (replace-regexp-in-string "^[ \\+\\-]" "" text)
                    text))))))

---

Edit: With the developmental version of Magit (what will be v2.91.0), you can strip the diff markers by marking a region of a hunk and calling magit-copy-section-value with a prefix argument.

Answer 3

Going off of Kyle Meyer's answer, if you want to copy the diff without needing to hit the prefix key, you can use the following:

(defun copy-diff-region ()
  "Copy diff region without + or - markers."
  (interactive)
  (deactivate-mark)
  (let ((text (buffer-substring-no-properties
               (region-beginning) (region-end))))
    (kill-new (replace-regexp-in-string "^[\\+\\-]" "" text))))

Answer 4

From the manual:

If a prefix argument is used and the region is within a hunk, then it strips the diff marker column and keeps only either the added or removed lines, depending on the sign of the prefix argument.

I can confirm that C-u C-w after selecting a region copies the lines without the prefix.