Magit magit-diff-refine-hunk does not work if I don't move the cursor to the good lines

Question

In magit, it looks like that if I want to have a diff that highlight changing words, I can either press D t when I'm in the diff, or put in my .emacs

(custom-set-variables '(magit-diff-refine-hunk all))

However, it turns out that the changing words are highlighted only if I move the buffer cursor near to the line that changed. So for example if I have two changes in the file, then I need to move my cursor to the diff of the second part of the file to see the changes.

Can I set it up so that the refine diff is displayed across all the buffer ?

Thank you!

Answer 1

That's because you are not using custom-set-variables correctly. You are not supposed to write that by hand, but if you wrote it like this

(custom-set-variables '(magit-diff-refine-hunk (quote all)))

then it should work. But just use this instead

(setq magit-diff-refine-hunk 'all)

As mentioned by @Basil, you could also use custom-set-variable (singular), but that only makes sense if setting the option through the Custom interface would do something beside setting the variable, i.e. if the defcustom sets :initialize, :set or :set-after'. Since that isn't the case here you should just usesetq'.