The pane beside a commit's diff showed the patch being built from it by
assembling the text itself. That text could not be handed to a diff
renderer the way a diff can: a stdin filter might have coped, but a tool
that diffs two files could not. Its idea of how much context to show
around a hunk was also its own rather than git's.
Materialize the patch instead: write each of its files as it is before the
patch into one tree and as it is after into another, and let git diff the
two trees. The patch becomes a diff of real files, rendered by whatever
renders the rest of them, with git's own context around it. Its lines can
then be pointed at; taking them back out of the patch will need that.
The trees are named a and b, so that with git's own prefixes suppressed
the paths read like an ordinary diff's over the repo's own paths. They are
written when the patch changes rather than when it is shown, the patch
builder counting its own versions for that, and they go away with the
patch.
A renamed file is materialized under the name the patch expects to find it
under. Where the patch carries the rename, that is the name the file had
before, so the rename comes out as a rename. git names the trees
themselves in the two rename lines, having only the two paths to go by.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A patch is built in terms of where a line sits in the file's diff, which is
what the patch explorer has to hand. The main view doesn't: a row of it
resolves to a line of a file, and what index that line has depends on how
much of the diff has been read and how a diff renderer chose to lay it out.
So let the two meet at the patch builder's edge, in the identity of a change
line — its number on the side it belongs to — leaving the main view to speak
only of lines it can see.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Stefan HallerandClaude Opus 5