Dysfunctional Programming

As a follow-up to my previous post about merging mq reject in emacs, I thought I’d share some improvements to the process that I’ve made since then.

It turns out that swapping back and forth between the reject and the original in a single window felt was quite inefficient. With these changes, the reject opens up in another window (think emacs terminology here) on C-c r, and I can kill it later with C-x r. This also works better with other modules like uniquify – the code from the previous post would fail when trying to access rejects associated with buffers name “Makefile.in|ipc”. No longer must you suffer the indignity of process! Merging can, and should, be fun! BEHOLD MY WORKS AND DESPAIR.

Since Mozilla has embraced mercurial, and especially patch queues, with open arms, I get to deal with rebasing patches frequently. There are two ways this can happen – either you set up an external merge tool like meld to handle each conflict, or the rejected changes are dumped in a filename.ext.rej in the same directory as the file being patched. Since I do all of my work in emacs, I’ve finally got around to writing an elisp function to allow me to switch to a reject file from the original quickly and painlessly:

A simple C-c r is all it takes to switch from nsFrameLoader.cpp to nsFrameLoader.cpp.rej in the current buffer, and another C-c r will take me back to the original. Now that’s convenience!