Context, whitespace and the minimap

Four controls in the diff header change how a change is drawn. None of them alters the change itself.

Context

A diff shows the changed lines plus some unchanged lines around them, so you can tell where you are. How many is adjustable, from a few lines up to the whole file.

The choice is shared between windows and kept across launches. With Entire File selected, individual files show all their lines and All files views use the repository default context.

It is worth more than it sounds. Three lines of context is enough to see that a line changed and rarely enough to see whether it changed correctly — the function it is in may start twenty lines above. Widening the context to the whole file turns a diff into the file, with the changes marked in it.

Context also decides where hunks begin and end: widening it can merge two adjacent hunks into one, and narrowing it can split one into two. If you are staging by hunk, that is a lever, not a side effect.

Whitespace markers

The ¶ toggle draws spaces, tabs and line endings. Off by default, because it makes ordinary code noisier; indispensable the moment a diff appears to change a line that looks identical.

The minimap

The map toggle draws a condensed picture of the whole file beside the diff, with the changed regions marked. On a long file it is the fastest way to see how many separate changes there are and roughly where.

Wrapping long lines

The Wrap long lines toggle folds a line too long for the column onto as many rows as it needs, instead of leaving it to run off the right-hand edge. Off by default, and the choice is global: it is kept for every diff you open next, and across launches.

It changes the layout and not the text. A folded line keeps its one line number and its one staging target, and copying or searching it gives back the single line the file holds.