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Is there a way to force Git in to treating .reg files as text? I am using Git to track my windows registry tweaks and Windows uses .reg for these files.
UPDATE 1: I got it to run a diff (thanks, Andrew). However, now it looks like this below. Is this an encoding issue?
index 0080fe3..fc51807 100644
--- a/Install On Rebuild/4. Registry Tweaks.reg
+++ b/Install On Rebuild/4. Registry Tweaks.reg
@@ -1,49 +1,48 @@
-<FF><FE>W^@i^@n^@d^@o^@w^@s^@ ^@R^@e^@g^@i^@s^@t^@r^@y^@ ^@E^@d^@i^@t^@o^@r^@
-^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;^@;
-^@^M^@
...
Any ideas?
UPDATE 2: Thanks all who helped: here's what I did in the end: create file .gitattributes with content *.reg text diff and then I converted the files to UTF-8 as UTF-16 is weird with diffs. I'm not using any foreign characters so UTF-8 works for me.
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Any binary format can be diffed with git, as long as there's a tool which converts the binary format to plain text. One just needs to add the conversion handlers and attributes in the same way.
gitattributes has a new working-tree-encoding attribute. As mentioned in "Set file as non-binary in git": "Why is Git marking my file as binary?" The answer is because it's seeing a NUL (0) byte somewhere within the first 8000 characters of the file.
Git can usually detect binary files automatically. No, Git will attempt to store delta-based changesets if it's less expensive to (not always the case). Submodules are used if you want to reference other Git repositories within your project.
It can, literally, compress (or "deltify") any binary data against any other binary data—but the results will be poor unless the inputs are well-chosen. It's the input choices that are the real key here. Git also has a technical documentation file describing how objects are chosen for deltification.
To tell git to explicitly diff a filetype, put the following in a .gitattributes file in your repository’s root directory:
*.reg diff
Git is treating your registry export files as binary files because they have NULs. There is no good way to diff or merge general binary files. A change of one byte can change the interpretation of the rest of the file.
There are two general approaches to handling binary files:
Accept that they're binary. Diffs aren't going to be meaningful, so don't ask for them. Don't ever merge them, which means only allowing changes on one branch. In this case, this can be made easier by putting each tweak (or set of related tweaks in a separate file, so there's fewer possible ways differences will happen in one file.
Store the changes as text, and convert/deconvert to these binary forms.
Even though these "text" files, the UTF-16 encoding contains NULs. There appear to be no non-ASCII bits however. Can you convert them to ASCII (or UTF-8, which will be ASCII if there are no extended characters)?
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