Magit: Is it possible to edit text directly in "Unstaged changes"?

Question

Windows 10, Emacs 25.1, Magit

Execute command magit-status and press "TAB". Here result:

If I want to change this text I go to my editor (e.g. Notepad++) and edit text.

The question is:

Can I directy edit text in magit buffer when files are in Unstaged changes?

Answer 1

The status buffer is just an interface to git; it's not an editor in itself, so you can't edit right from there. In Emacs, this isn't a problem, since you just RET and it takes you to the file/line/column you were at. There is still a feature request for this enhancement, but such functionality would be weird IMO since you'd have to enter some other mode within magit-status-mode since most keys already mean something special.

You mention though that you want to use a different editor to edit this text. If that is your real question, read below.

If your editor supports command-line arguments, you can do this rather easily at a file-level by advising magit-diff-visit-file:

(defun open-in-vscode (orig-fun &rest args)
  (let ((file (car args)))
    ;; If you don't want this behavior for every file/project,
    ;; you can still keep the old behavior using `orig-fun`.
    (if (or t (should-open-in-vs-code file))
        (call-process
         ;; This is VS Code, the only other editor I have installed
         ;; Look up Notepadd++'s arguments as appropriate.
         "/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin/code"
         nil nil nil
         file)
      (apply orig-fun args))))

(advice-add #'magit-diff-visit-file :around #'open-in-vscode)

If you want to jump to the file:line:column, you'll have to dig deeper into magit-diff-visit-file and possibly provide a reimplementation (then advising using :override) that will do the right thing for you. The line/column information is already available in magit-diff-visit-file, so it would just be a matter of putting that information to other use.

Answer 2

If you make the status buffer editable (M-x read-only-mode), you actually can edit it. Note, though, that this edits only the magit status buffer, and not the underlying file, and this is generally very hacky and it's easy to break the status buffer this way.

However, this can still be useful because you can then perform git operations on the edited diffs - e.g. you can edit a part of a diff, then select and stage the edited variant.

One particularly useful operation which can be done this way is to reorder lines to allow staging only some edits in consecutive edited lines. For example, if the old file is:

fun(apple);
bun(banana);

and it was changed to:

fun(apple2);
bun(banana2);

then the diff will be:

-fun(apple);
-bun(banana);
+fun(apple2);
+bun(banana2);

If you wish to stage only changes in the first line, staging only the -fun(apple); and +fun(apple2); lines will not do what you want - it will reorder the calls. However, by making the magit status buffer writable, you can reorder lines to make it look like this:

-fun(apple);
+fun(apple2);
-bun(banana);
+bun(banana2);

Then, you can select the first two lines and stage them, achieving the desired result.