5 Inspecting

The functionality provided by Magit can be roughly divided into three groups: inspecting existing data, manipulating existing data or adding new data, and transferring data. Of course that is a rather crude distinction that often falls short, but it’s more useful than no distinction at all. This section is concerned with inspecting data, the next two with manipulating and transferring it. Then follows a section about miscellaneous functionality, which cannot easily be fit into this distinction.

Of course other distinctions make sense too, e.g. Git’s distinction between porcelain and plumbing commands, which for the most part is equivalent to Emacs’ distinction between interactive commands and non-interactive functions. All of the sections mentioned before are mainly concerned with the porcelain – Magit’s plumbing layer is described later.