magit ediff conflicts wordwise

Question

During a magit-rebase I'm running into conflicts on single long lines, where I'd like to take some parts of the line from the A and some from the B buffer.

After hitting * -refine current region within magit-ediff-dwim I can view the wordwise diff between two buffers. However, the actual diff chunks to choose from are much bigger. Is it possible to update these chunks so I can resolve the conflicts word by word (similar to ediff-regions-wordwise)?

Answer 1

Good question. This feels like it should be standard. With a little digging into the code and experimenting, this seems at first glance to work:

From the ediff control window:

• M-: (setq ediff-word-mode t) RET
• ! to run ediff-update-diffs

Which we can encapsulate in a command (which I've bound to . in the ediff control buffer) like so:

(defun my-ediff-toggle-word-mode ()
  "Toggle between linewise and wordwise comparisons."
  (interactive)
  (setq ediff-word-mode (not ediff-word-mode))
  (ediff-update-diffs))

(add-hook 'ediff-startup-hook #'my-ediff-startup-hook)

(defun my-ediff-startup-hook ()
  "Custom `ediff-startup-hook' behaviours."
  (define-key ediff-mode-map (kbd ".") #'my-ediff-toggle-word-mode))

Note that ediff-word-mode disables refinements, so you would need to use @ to restore that (if desired) after toggling back to linewise diffs.

If you don't experience any issues with this (let me know), then I think this should be a feature-request (M-x report-emacs-bug).