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Oh that’s clever, I’ll try that out. Looks like you could just do a git diff > file.patch.

Neat.

You’ll also want to familiarize with “git apply -3 <file name>”, for when a diff can’t be applied cleanly. It will try “harder” to merge (three way method) and if it still fails it invokes the conflict merge “UX”:

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There's also Neil Brown's "wiggle" program for applying patches that don't apply.

https://github.com/neilbrown/wiggle

although on debian based systems I think you can just "apt install wiggle"

What does "applying patches that don't apply" mean exactly?

I know about wiggle, but I have not used it, to be honest.

It means that if you do "patch -p1 --dry-run < some.patch", and it complains that it doesn't apply, wiggle can sometimes apply it anyway, and also, if you do "patch -p1 < some.patch", and it partially applies but with rejected hunks, wiggle can try to apply the rejected hunks.

git diff an pipe works, but committing and then `git format-patch` can export multiple patches and then includes metadata (commit message, date, author, etc.) which can make reasoning about such files a lot easier. In a plain diff you only got filename as metadata.

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