A.1 FAQ - How to …?

A.1.1 How to pronounce Magit?

Either mu[m's] git or magi{c => t} is fine.

The slogan is "It’s Magit! The magical Git client", so it makes sense to pronounce Magit like magic, while taking into account that C and T do not sound the same.

The German "Magie" is not pronounced the same as the English "magic", so if you speak German, then you can use the above rationale to justify using the former pronunciation; Mag{ie => it}.

You can also choose to use the former pronunciation just because you like it better.

Also see https://magit.vc/assets/videos/magic.mp4. Also see https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/13696.

A.1.2 How to show git’s output?

To show the output of recently run git commands, press $ (or, if that isn’t available, use M-x magit-process-buffer). This shows a buffer containing a section per git invocation; as always press TAB to expand or collapse them.

By default, git’s output is only inserted into the process buffer if it is run for side-effects. When the output is consumed in some way, also inserting it into the process buffer would be too expensive. For debugging purposes, it’s possible to do so anyway, using M-x magit-toggle-git-debug.

A.1.3 How to install the gitman info manual?

Git’s manpages can be exported as an info manual called gitman. Magit’s own info manual links to nodes in that manual instead of the actual manpages, simply because Info doesn’t support linking to manpages.

Unfortunately some distributions do not install the gitman manual by default and you would have to install a separate documentation package to get it.

Magit patches info, adding the ability to visit links to the gitman info manual, by instead viewing the respective manpage. If you prefer that approach, then set the value of magit-view-git-manual-method to one of the supported Emacs packages man or woman, e.g.:

(setq magit-view-git-manual-method 'man)

A.1.4 How to show diffs for gpg-encrypted files?

Git supports showing diffs for encrypted files, but has to be told to do so. Since Magit just uses Git to get the diffs, configuring Git also affects the diffs displayed inside Magit.

git config --global diff.gpg.textconv "gpg --no-tty --decrypt"
echo "*.gpg filter=gpg diff=gpg" > .gitattributes

A.1.5 How does branching and pushing work?

Please see Branching and https://emacsair.me/2016/01/18/magit-2.4

A.1.6 Should I disable VC?

If you don’t use VC (the built-in version control interface) then you might be tempted to disable it, not least because we used to recommend that you do that.

We no longer recommend that you disable VC. Doing so would break useful third-party packages (such as diff-hl), which depend on VC being enabled.

If you choose to disable VC anyway, then you can do so by changing the value of vc-handled-backends.