Unpredictable diff split behaviour

[simonmclean]

A common part of my workflow before I commit is to do a quick visual scan of my changes. I do :tab G, move my cursor over a file, and then dd. But I've found the result of dd can be quite inconsistent in how it decides to perform the split. Usually it'll leave the status view at the top, and then open 2 buffers underneath like this (which I like)

| status |
----------
|  A | B |

But other times it'll do

| status |
----------
|   A    |
----------
|   B    |
----------

And other times it'll take over the whole status view like

|  A  |  B  |

I know I can eliminate the vertical vs horizontal inconsistency by using dv. But it feels like it should be more predicable, and dv still can have inconsistent results.

So I'm just wondering whether this is a Vim thing, or a Fugitive thing? And whether there's some way I can mitigate it? I think what it comes down to is that there's some algorithm which decides how to lay things out, whereas I'd like to have complete control of that myself.

[tpope]

Horizontal versus vertical is determined based on the window width, as documented. Long term it might get phased out but I don't take changes like that lightly. If you don't like it use dv.

:Git and derivatives like :tab G set a special internal flag on the window that prevents "take over". If you open the buffer another way, then it won't have that. It's 100% predictable.