Git – commit only parts of the code using SVN or Mercurial

gitmercurialsvntortoisesvnversion control

I use Tortoise SVN usuallly, but I have been looking into Mercurial since it is a distributed revision control system.

What I am looking for, in both systems, is a tool that let me pick only parts of a file and commit them. If I want to do this now, I have to copy to a temp version of the file and keep only the changes I want to commit in the current version, and then copy the temp version to the current version again after committing. It's just such a hassle and the program should be able to do this for me.

I heard Git supports this, please let me know if this is correct.

Best Answer

Mercurial can do this with the record extension.

It'll prompt you for each file and each diff hunk. For example:

% hg record
diff --git a/prelim.tex b/prelim.tex
2 hunks, 4 lines changed
examine changes to 'prelim.tex'? [Ynsfdaq?]  
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
 \setmonofont[Scale=0.88]{Consolas}
 % missing from xunicode.sty
 \DeclareUTFcomposite[\UTFencname]{x00ED}{\'}{\i}
-\else
+\else foo
 \usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
 \fi

record this change to 'prelim.tex'? [Ynsfdaq?]  
@@ -1281,3 +1281,5 @@
 %% Local variables:
 %% mode: latex
 %% End:
+
+foo
\ No newline at end of file
record this change to 'prelim.tex'? [Ynsfdaq?]  n
Waiting for Emacs...

After the commit, the remaining diff will be left behind:

% hg di
diff --git a/prelim.tex b/prelim.tex
--- a/prelim.tex
+++ b/prelim.tex
@@ -1281,3 +1281,5 @@
 %% Local variables:
 %% mode: latex
 %% End:
+
+foo
\ No newline at end of file

Alternatively, you may find it easier to use MQ (Mercurial Queues) to separate the individual changes in your repository into patches. There is a MQ variant of record (qrecord), too.

Update: Also try the crecord extension, which provides a curses interface to hunk/line selection.

crecord screenshot