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Version Control for Writers

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28 pointsalbertsun17 comments

Not sure I understand the target audience for this. If you're writing in text files instead of Word and are comfortable working in the terminal, wouldn't you also be comfortable with a Git GUI? What would be cool is if there were plugins that could show diffs for non-text files like Word.

Actually, MS Word have such functionality, and TortoiseSVN allows to see diff between versions of Word document

I don't know anyone who would ever write a manuscript as collection of text files. This is non sense.

For a book you may use one file per chapter, for an article a unique file - always in a formatting word processor. Sure, it would be nice to have a version control system working transparently withing the word processor, namely recognizing changes paragraph by paragraph.

  I don't know anyone who would ever write a manuscript as collection of text 
  files.

Oh, I would. org-mode would make it a very pleasant experience, as long as there wasn't too much custom formatting.

    I don't know anyone who would ever write a manuscript as
    collection of text files. This is non sense.

Really? I thought lots of people wrote books with tex...

I'm more interested by the versioning function. For book-size manuscripts i work chapter by chapter + annexes.

I have to agree. If I were writing, I'd want something that had formatting, but wasn't too heavy. Maybe markdown or something. Ideally, it would create nice changelogs in Git even when dealing with markup changes.

I would think it wouldn't be too hard to write a little program that lets you edit visually, then stores the proper text file on disc and commits it whenever you save. Or maybe commits when you tell it to, giving you a chance to enter a commit message that means something.

That is a good idea. That way you could use flashbacke as main engine and add a frontend to make it work from openoofice or word.

I don't know anyone who would ever write a manuscript as collection of text files.

I know of two professional writers who use Emacs.

Neal Stephenson: If you are a professional writer--i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed--emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars.

http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.sht...

Vernor Vinge also uses Emacs, and RCS for version control:

http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/vingeinterview...

I'm under the impression that many fiction writers work with straight, unformatted text.

Interesting, but I'm completely baffled by the plugins. Why do I want the current weather and my last few twitter messages in my commit log? Isn't that completely irrelevant to what I'm committing?

But I want the future generations to know that I praised Justin Bieber's haircut on twitter while listening to his latest song!

Yeah, I agree - completely irrelevant. That time better get spent integrating diff-able formats like textile, markdown, even TeX into writers' versioned workflows.

If memory serves, Cory Doctorow commissioned flashbake, and he wanted it not for backup purposes but as the equivalent of old drafts of books and the like for scholarly research. Git in particular will commit with an empty commit message but is not thrilled about it, and I think there are other VCSes that are more anal about that, thus the need for some text was expressed and "whatever was going on for me while I wrote it" in particular was desired.

So yes, it is completely irrelevant for most purposes to you. I suppose it might be nice to run some sort of semantic analysis that notes that someone writes depressing drippy love poems when it's raining out or something, but I'll be damned if I can figure out why the hell that would be important for me at all. OTOH, flashbake also has a plugin that supports some crude notion of where the commit was written (pretty much gotten from the weather info), which might be more legitimately interesting.

Geotagged commits might actually be cool, especially on plane trips. Though I suspect most of mine would just be the latitude and longitude of my couch.

It strikes me that the other twitter/weather stuff is redundant in the face of the timestamps and geotags...

I could see that data being nice to review if you were writing a private diary/journal for your own future consumption.

Other than that, the concept seems pretty flawed - git is useful when you manually commit at the end of a chunk of writing, and again after an edit/change. Wrangling with commits made at preset intervals - when you're likely in the middle of a paragraph - seems like it would be a nightmare, and next to useless if you need to revert to an earlier draft.

Being a writer, I don't see a point in this. When I was writing reviews, multiple files would have made it a clogged mess and to actually write efficiently there wasn't much time to be changing things up. If it wasn't close enough that the editor would fix it, then the entire thing would be redone.

While I'm writing short stories I'd get the same problem. A few thousand words is easier to edit by mind than version control would be. For a novel I see the use in chapter control, but I fail to see how useful it really would be as a novel isn't a series of unconnected events that can be seamlessly changed without huge catastrophic changes to the entire piece.

I love the idea of automatic secure saves for my writings. I can use flashbake instead of dropbox. But i'd like to have a clear understanding of GitHub free plans caveats, especially about privacy of the repos :)

AFAICT, free Github repositories are always public.

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