I want a command -- "patch-interactively". It takes a diff as input and lets you interactively walk through it as it tries to apply to your tree -- sorta like how darcs (or git add -p) does interactive cherry-picking of diff chunks, or sorta like how merge tools work but without applying any of the diff without your explicit action.
Here's my common scenario: I'm working on a patch and I discover I've unintentionally changed the whitespace on a part I don't care about. I don't want to throw away all my work but I want a minimal diff. I find myself manually reconstructing the whitespace -- lame. (I believe but it's been too long for me to say definitively that darcs provides an interactive revert command just for this kind of scenario.) In my imagined world I could run "
git diff | patch-interactively" to pick and revert just what I wanted.Another common scenario: you have a patch where half of it is good, but the other half isn't. I find myself manually editing the patch and deleting the chunks I don't like -- also lame, and sometimes I end up corrupting the patch. Instead, I could "
patch-interactively < patch".In all cases I want something fancier than the darcs interface; good merge tools (side-by-side, coloring) are way too useful.
As before, I have the suspicion this has already been built -- where? (Feels like the kind of thing that Emacs would do...)