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Comment by michaericalribo | Hacker News Reader

Magit is magic: coupled with customization via elisp, it feels smooth as butter to navigate hairy rebases, commit individual lines in changed files, or jump to open a PR in a browser.

One of my daily drivers for development, and a real killer extension to emacs

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I also love:

- magit-blame: show the commits for each line - magit-find-file: allows you to open a file from any branch. So you can easily have the same file from two different branches opened side by side. - magit-log-buffer-file: shows the git tree with all commits that modified the file in the current buffer (which you can then navigate just like you would when doing M-x magit-status l l)

And this package is pretty sweet as well: https://melpa.org/#/git-timemachine , it allows you to navigate the git tree for a given file easily.

magit-blame also allows you to step back through the history for each line by repeatedly pressing b. So after a developer has run formatters for the whole codebase and "broken" git blame, you can still see the real blame by just pressing b twice.

It's not obvious from the name, but magit-log-buffer-file also lets you browse the history of just the current region.

It exist in stock emacs as vc-region-history. Fantastic functionality.

Thanks for mentioning magit-find-file. I’ve been using magit recently for the ease of doing commits of smaller hunks, but I didn’t know about find-file. I was just in a situation yesterday where I could’ve used it—wound up going to look at the second version of the file in GH.

Could you elaborate on how git-timemachine is different from magit, as the latter also lets one navigate the git tree for a given file, doesn't it?

I knew magit really was magic when all of the sudden I became the guy people went to when they needed help with with their complicated git tasks. Before magit I knew I was only scratching the surface of git's power, but could never figure out the command line interface well enough to do more than the basics. I still don't feel like I'm a git expert, but magit lets me use it like I'm one.

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