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Am I missing something? This already exists in Google Docs. Much easier to implement when the doc is database-backed (recording every keystroke for OT) vs file-based.

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The Docs versión history tooling is pretty weak, though — you have to repeatedly select a timestamp. You can’t scrub, and you can’t even click on text and get “who put this here, when?”

Yeah, the thing is, you can't do this in a file-format-agnostic way (you need to know what a Word doc or an Excel sheet is), which makes the file system layer the wrong level of abstraction to consider.

You can, as long as your files have a meaningful representation as a text file. This is a good idea anyways.

That representation is one way to encode the file-format knowledge you need.

Any other way to implement would probably also involve one common format (or a small few) behind the scenes.

The diff when database-backed is still going to be file-format specific because a text-based document will not be stored in a DB identically to a spreadsheet.

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