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B Debugging Tools

Magit and its dependencies provide a few debugging tools, and we appreciate it very much if you use those tools before reporting an issue. Please include all relevant output when reporting an issue.

M-x magit-version ¶

This command shows the currently used versions of Magit, Git, and Emacs in the echo area. Non-interactively this just returns the Magit version.

M-x magit-emacs-Q-command ¶

This command shows a debugging shell command in the echo area and adds it to the kill ring. Paste that command into a shell and run it.

This shell command starts emacs with only magit and its dependencies loaded. Neither your configuration nor other installed packages are loaded. This makes it easier to determine whether some issue lays with Magit or something else.

If you run Magit from its Git repository, then you should be able to use make emacs-Q instead of the output of this command.

M-x magit-toggle-git-debug ¶

This command toggles whether additional git errors are reported.

Magit basically calls git for one of these two reasons: for side-effects or to do something with its standard output.

When git is run for side-effects then its output, including error messages, go into the process buffer which is shown when using $.

When git’s output is consumed in some way, then it would be too expensive to also insert it into this buffer, but when this option is non-nil and git returns with a non-zero exit status, then at least its standard error is inserted into this buffer.

This is only intended for debugging purposes. Do not enable this permanently, that would negatively affect performance. Also note that just because git exits with a non-zero exit status and prints an error message that usually doesn’t mean that it is an error as far as Magit is concerned, which is another reason we usually hide these error messages. Whether some error message is relevant in the context of some unexpected behavior has to be judged on a case by case basis.

M-x magit-toggle-verbose-refresh ¶

This command toggles whether Magit refreshes buffers verbosely. Enabling this helps figuring out which sections are bottlenecks. The additional output can be found in the *Messages* buffer.

M-x magit-debug-git-executable ¶

This command displays a buffer containing information about the available and used git executable(s), and can be useful when investigating exec-path issues.

Also see Git Executable.

M-x with-editor-debug ¶

This command displays a buffer containing information about the available and used emacsclient executable(s), and can be useful when investigating why Magit (or rather with-editor) cannot find an appropriate emacsclient executable.

Also see (with-editor)Debugging.

Please also see FAQ.