mercurial/help/diffs.txt
author Jun Wu <quark@fb.com>
Wed, 04 May 2016 18:18:24 +0100
changeset 29070 29a7d591ff42
parent 12083 ebfc46929f3e
permissions -rw-r--r--
ui: add new config option for help text width Before this patch, when printing help text using `hg help`, or `hg log -h`, the output will wrap at 78 chars even if the user has a bigger terminal width and there is no config option to change it, making the experience different from the commonly used `man` tool. This patch introduces a new config option `ui.textwidth`, which replaces the hardcoded number. It's set to 78 by default to maintain compatibility. When set to 0, `hg help` will behave more like `man`.

Mercurial's default format for showing changes between two versions of
a file is compatible with the unified format of GNU diff, which can be
used by GNU patch and many other standard tools.

While this standard format is often enough, it does not encode the
following information:

- executable status and other permission bits
- copy or rename information
- changes in binary files
- creation or deletion of empty files

Mercurial also supports the extended diff format from the git VCS
which addresses these limitations. The git diff format is not produced
by default because a few widespread tools still do not understand this
format.

This means that when generating diffs from a Mercurial repository
(e.g. with :hg:`export`), you should be careful about things like file
copies and renames or other things mentioned above, because when
applying a standard diff to a different repository, this extra
information is lost. Mercurial's internal operations (like push and
pull) are not affected by this, because they use an internal binary
format for communicating changes.

To make Mercurial produce the git extended diff format, use the --git
option available for many commands, or set 'git = True' in the [diff]
section of your configuration file. You do not need to set this option
when importing diffs in this format or using them in the mq extension.