Hacker News Reader

Version control needs to be visual and pervasive.

It also needs to deal with whatever files you want to dump into it.

Dropbox (as you guys mention) as well as Google Drive and OneDrive and I am certain a lot of others have already implemented.

All files are versioned and for the most part you dont have to do anything.

All of this is clear with it comes to Git, with the 100+ different programs trying to give people a visual experience, over cryptic and inconsistent command line interface.

I am working on a simple proof of concept on a new way to visualize changes in code. Still early. It is far from trivial, but I think it is needed. There is a good chance I will fail of course. But if enough people think about it someone will figure out a better way than what we have now.

Well some of the work has already been done, for a long time in more integrated IDEs where the environment is much more interactive and interlaced.

I'd be happy to hear about your project and share my learnings if you want to schedule a time to talk. I've put a tiny bit of thought into this problem and would love to pass on what I've learned.

The way I originally conceptualized floro was a way to version anything without requiring plain-text (ie. higher order versioning). I've strayed quite a bit from that belief and I think there's a lot of complex trade-offs involved in version control and what makes sense for specific use-cases. Floro would be trash for game development but that is an industry that sorely faces tough versioning problems involving graphical data.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you do want to chat. The discord for floro is listed on the website but you can also just check my HN bio for my email.

Check out some of the work at https://www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/notebook/

I love ink & switch! I think Martin, Geoffrey, and the whole team are crazy smart.

There's a whole bunch of approaches to universal versioning and I think floro is one of a few upcoming techniques in the ether.

From my limited understanding of their approach, it looks like they're going to be really focused on things like rich text diffing, which is not something I think floro is particularly well suited for. I think floro is really great for things that end up getting consumed as code rather than something like note-taking. e.g. static assets & i18n.

It's really exciting to see this space actually beginning to blossom though!

I don't know if I am your target audience, but it seems like it's doing a whole lot more than most people would need.

I feel like there is huge value in version control that supports various binaries with custom diff support. Perforce, git-lfs, etc. offer binary version control, but not custom and useful diff tooling per binary type. Kaleidoscope, Beyond Compare, etc. offer some improved diff tooling, but not for a wide variety of file types.

That seems like it would be the essence of a product like this.

I suspect that many of the people who influence the adoption of VCS are likely deeply technical and will likely actively avoid products that are opinionated on the target output when using the VCS.

I think you're probably correct that you likely aren't the target audience here. Version control is a loaded term. This would be a terrible replacement for perforce or anything for diffing something like a CAD file.

The real focus of the system is for things that are better managed by people who aren't engineers but end up interfacing with code very tightly. The idea was to focus on the peripheral functions that come up in UI engineering and enable e.g. translators, copy editors, and designers to essentially commit to a codebase without having to understand git or know how to handle plaint text merge conflicts.

> I suspect that many of the people who influence the adoption of VCS are likely deeply technical and will likely actively avoid products that are opinionated on the target output when using the VCS.

I totally agree. You can modify the output to your hearts desire. This was a big part of our design.

Git does support custom diffing algorithms and tools.

It does but it can't support cascading states. I kind of explain this at the bottom of this page https://floro.io/technical-overview-part-2

i did not understand what a cascading merge is after reading this twice. if you have a git threeway merge and a merge tool that can parse and merge all three filestates what exactly would your solution solve that the git one cannot?

I'll try to contextualize it in the case of something like AST merging so it's more familiar.

Imagine you have file A and file B. In one change someone adds some code that imports something from file B into file A. In another change someone deletes file B without touching file A. That will result in a valid three-way merge. However, your compiler will complain and you will have to update file A to remove the references to file B. This is okay because you can edit the plain-text and fix the inconsistency. This doesn't work for things where you can't really hop in and manually fix the conflict.

You could definitely create a tool that understand the AST and knows how to remove stale references. If you add in the requirement that there cannot be inconsistent states at any commit you've essentially derived an entirely new merging system. Could you build this on top of git? Sure, it's a plain-text system, you could build anything on top it. Is there any gain if the point of the system is to disallow manual conflict resolution and enforce consistent state? I don't think so but maybe I'm not seeing something.

But can't you have a custom merge driver for 3 way merges too? So that when you try to merge the changes it does complain?

The advantage of building this on top of Git is fairly obvious: you get to use all the existing Git tooling, and you can use Git for other files in the repo that don't need special merge drivers.

> But can't you have a custom merge driver for 3 way merges too? So that when you try to merge the changes it does complain?

You kind of could, at least for diffing. This is what difftastic does https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/. Merging is really ambiguous in what the intended behavior of a removed reference is in AST. Do you delete or nullify or something else? How does that affect other upstream references? I'm not sure you'll ever find a satisfying answer there but floro is constrained to static assets, which are a bit more predictable.

> The advantage of building this on top of Git is fairly obvious: you get to use all the existing Git tooling, and you can use Git for other files in the repo that don't need special merge drivers.

So I think there is some confusion here in how this interfaces with code and I'm sorry I didn't think to explain this first. With floro you have a file in your git repository that points to a sha from floro to generate your assets from.

Here's an example https://github.com/florophore/floro-react-native-demo/blob/m...

I think of it sort of like having a package.json and a lockfile. You don't check your dependencies into git because odds are you don't want to deal with merge conflicts in third party dependencies, just the package.json and lockfile. Similarly you wouldn't want to deal with the conflicts of floro in a git repo. So you do still you get to use all the existing Git tooling with respect to your codebase.

The problem really is that git would allow for inconsistent states, which is fine for programmers but tough for anyone who doesn't know how to resolve the inconsistencies.

i dont see how that solves the issue you describe. if i delete an icon from the floro repo and my code in git imports this icon and renders it. floro cannot do anything to help there. the only consistency floro can enforce is if i use a color from a color set in an icon in floro and remove the color, it could complain i have to first change the color in the icon. but this sound like a really minor inconvencience vs not being able to do everything with git. or is there a concrete example where this would matter?

another point is that enforcing invariancts is not the task of the repo but of the checks / review system. it is very simple to enforce your described cross file constraint with a ci check and prevent merging. and floro could also not automatically solve the conflict of inconsistency as concurrent deletion and modification of any data is fundamentally undecidable without knowledge of the application logic and business domain and sometimes even human user intent. this is the problem most conflict "free" replicated datatypes have, most inherently lose data in at least these situations unless they keep conflict markers for all these situations around until an application solves them at some point in the future.

HN isn't letting me nest further. I'll do my best to answer these in the order I saw them posted.

1) "i dont see how that solves the issue you describe..."

>the only consistency floro can enforce is if i use a color from a color set in an icon in floro and remove the color, it could complain i have to first change the color in the icon.

So it does do this actually, which is super helpful. You can also check for this in CI and choose to fail a build because of the inconsistency. It's also part of the REST api too so you can decide if you want to make a live update to something via webhook based on if inconsistencies are present. (see https://floro.io/docs/dev/api Invalidity Map Endpoint).

> if i delete an icon from the floro repo and my code in git imports this icon and renders it. floro cannot do anything to help there.

Actually, you kind of can. You have to do some static analysis that gets checked into git but you can use this to determine what is safe and unsafe to update in prod. I could delete the tagline of the webiste and modify some other piece of copy and it would not delete the tagline but would modify the other copy in production. This is really up to the codebase in how they want to handle live updates.

Here is an example of the webhook I do this in https://github.com/florophore/floro-mono/blob/main/packages/....

But I do not do this for icons because I don't really want to live update icons in production.

> but this sound like a really minor inconvencience vs not being able to do everything with git. or is there a concrete example where this would matter?

So the above point is where this really matters a lot and is not about minor convenience. Being able to make live updates to a site without having to worry about breaking the production app and going through a buid-pipeline is by far my favorite feature of the whole thing. Could you do this with a headless CMS? Yes/Kind of, it really depends how complicated the asset is and how much you think type-safety really benefits you. There's also a whole host of CI/CD problems you run into then.

> i dont see how that solves the issue you describe.

I don't know if I have much else to add aside from the above comments. If inconsistencies introduced to the repository prevent a translator or designer from using the tool until the inconsistency is resolved that's a really bad experience. I think if you can use plain-text for something, definitely do it. But it's a pretty unpleasant experience for people like translators and non-technical folks.

2) "another point is that enforcing invariancts..."

> another point is that enforcing invariancts is not the task of the repo but of the checks / review system. it is very simple to enforce your described cross file constraint with a ci check and prevent merging.

So yes and no. If we were to analogize this entirely to code I would 100% agree with you, but for simpler structured data types you can definitely describe cascading behaviors that could be anticipated and should be enforced by the version control system, which maybe gets at the heart of why I think it would not be useful to build this on top of git.

> and floro could also not automatically solve the conflict of inconsistency as concurrent deletion and modification of any data is fundamentally undecidable without knowledge of the application logic and business domain and sometimes even human user intent.

It does not use auto-merge, unlike CRDTs it does use user intent if a conflict occurs. It chooses between two sequences of potential acceptable merge results (yours and theirs). I do really describe this in depth in the page I posted above, I'm sorry if it's not clear.

You are correct that you don't get the granularity of picking some changes from yours vs theirs. You have to accept the entire state of either yours or theirs for a conflict before you can make revisions to resolve the conflict but you can manually resolve the consistency issues of the merge conflict in the plugin UIs, I actually show this very briefly at the end of our demo video.

thanks for your answers, really appreciated! ok so now i am really confused. on one hand you are talking about live updating websites without rebuild and providing the assets as an api, but then you commit the root hash of the floro repo into the git repo. so your production website loads whatever latest asset version from a floro api endpoint and my repo state is not a snapshot anymore of what what the page will look like on production? in that case why do the repo connection at all? isnt floro then much more a cms / custom database with versioning for translations/ assets/ colors than an extension of the repo side?

Now we’re getting into the depths! This is a great question/point.

> so your production website loads whatever latest asset version from a floro api endpoint and my repo state is not a snapshot anymore of what what the page will look like on production?

Yes! But it’s your choice to decide which plugins to do this with. You can break your build environment without breaking your production environment, which is really important because you want CI to catch something like a missing icon or a bad invocation of a pluralized string but you also don’t want to block being able to update safe production changes like correcting a minor-typo. Breaking a build because an assets was deleted is easy to resolve for engineers.

> in that case why do the repo connection at all? isnt floro then much more a cms / custom database with versioning for translations/ assets/ colors than an extension of the repo side?

I think it would be very intellectually dishonest to say otherwise (with some minor caveats) but you could say the same about code too. Isn’t github just a CMS for code?

The thing about the snapshot that the code imports at compile time is it allows you to determine the structure of how the application consumes assets in static analysis. This is what allows you to determine what is safe to update live and what isn’t. Could you do this by snapshotting a database and performing static analysis on your imports? Yes, you certainly could but that’s not what CMSs do at all ...and SQL is really not good for merging things. Headless CMSs are built for really redundant data-structures because that’s what marketers need and they nearly all suffer from the same CI/CD issues for that reason. Why do we mostly check i18n string into git and not use CMSs for string content?

Ignoring all the other parts of version control we’re taking for granted here, branching, peer reviews, merging, etc. The big benefit of it all working offline is that you can let the non-engineers, who either lack access control to git or could not technically manage setting up the code base, test out content changes locally on your production site or app. CMSs can do with this with iframes but again, it’s really for blogging content/static content and not i18n. The other area where offline testing shines for people who aren’t engineers is being able to test out content changes on mobile devices over the local-network. That’s not really a thing CMS systems can do at all.

I was building a very similar solution two years back after seeing the struggle of managing the assets for the design teams. Mostly people were using google-drive to share/collect/update the assets which was not very systematic. I envision my solution to fix this with the similar insiparation of VCS and proper integration with existing design tools, but after some time realized that the solution was not good enough and it quickly became too technical for the design folks.

I mean this is the struggle. And props to you for building that. It's an ugly problem.

I actually do think (and have personal evidence now to believe) that most functions adjacent to engineering can learn distributed version control. Once you start using it, you really don't want to go back.

We've internally adopted trunk based development for our assets and it gets rid of 99% of the confusing parts of version control to not use branches (I know blasphemy). My designer just pulls and pushes on the main branch and I do the same -- we've had very very few merge conflicts and none that couldn't be resolved in 30 seconds.

I feel silly now having spent so much time on branching as a feature. It makes a lot of sense for plain text and code but it probably doesn't matter that much (for small teams) for visual things. Merging has proven to be invaluable to us though.

Every clone in git is a branch. People like to enterprisify things, resulting in miserable people, wasted time, and money flowing into consulting firms.

Remember, git replaced tarballs

Exactly! This was actually Linus' point when he was explaining git to companies still on cvs. "You're all already using branches anyway".

I think if you're in a low-trust enterprise environment, branches kind of make sense because you get the additional scrutiny of code-review and merges occur on a centralized server but if you're in a four person team where you trust everyone just use the main branch and resolve locally.

> Remember, git replaced tarballs

I would refine that to say 3-way-merging replaced tarballs but yes!

Love the idea but please pay for a UX professional. This UI just screams "we have $component_library, why would we ever need a designer?".

we do =D ... She's still getting her chops though.

We'll probably end up using webflow to market to designers. We were going for hackerish today.

We actually didn't use any component library. We designed all of our own components in-house

Get her a copy of https://www.howtodesignbetter.com/ebook and https://www.refactoringui.com/

Once she's reworked it, I'd ask her to get it critiqued by experienced designers.

The two part technical overview was a fantastic writeup and illustration! I didn't understand why you were using that JSON structure to illustrate everything until I watched the demo video of your diffable UI. I hope it catches on, but am wondering if you're planning to apply the same techniques to traditional designer working files.

Thank you so much!

I put so much effort into that and you are probably the only person on earth who has actually read that thing in its entirety (aside from my poor, ex-midwife, mother who has no idea what I'm talking about).

> but am wondering if you're planning to apply the same techniques to traditional designer working files.

I would love to. When I discovered the JSON trick I felt really confident that this was the inevitable direction of the project but after writing a few plugins I'm not exactly sure how practical I really think that is now. It's great for primitives but I'm apprehensive about anything that starts to get into the no-code territory. I think it's possible but there's some mathematical and UI challenges I've got to overcome.

To make something more complex than a TMS system I really need to make the schema language a bit more robust in a way that is probably beyond my engineering skills. I need to find someone who actually knows how to write compilers and understands category theory (not me haha). I think this could be applied to something more general like figma/sketch though and I hope it's a first step for someone smarter than me to fill that gap.

Hey this is cool. I think there could be a place for a new kind of version control. I'll test it out.

Thank you! I'll put my email in my bio if you want any help at all, It's a heavy installation (but straightforward once it's setup).

In this youtube video example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fjixBNKUbM

you demonstrate adding the new icon to the page and then modifying it with a hover alternative color. But the rest of the compare/diff/review workflow only focuses on the change between non-highlighted -> highlighted. To me, the important part is the addition of the icon to the page, and as a reviewer it would be of upmost importance to see the visual diff of the page before and after, rather than just an icon and it's hover alternative.

By page do you mean like your live website with the changes?

I've thought about this too and I think down the line the plan is to be able to attach screenshots to merge requests. However, as a reviewer you can also pull down the changes and test them against your production site locally. So you can alter between the main branch and the feature branch and compare the differences like that. The benefit of this over a screenshot is it lets you actually get to see something like the hover effect in action.

In the demo they clearly have a wysiwyg app allowing them to drag in the icon, so the project is already set up for "live demo". If i'm a non-technical reviewer, like a designer (their target market I believe), I shouldn't be expected to pull down changes and test locally (unless that part can be automated and made super easy to do without fuss).

Figma kind of already does this (visual diff) with some of their tools for designers, although i'm not sure how well that can be integrated into a full fledged web-app who's changes and reviews could be shared by designers and engineers.

> I shouldn't be expected to pull down changes and test locally (unless that part can be automated and made super easy to do without fuss).

It's super easy and there's no fuss. You literally just switch branches. It's really easy to think the experience is analogous to code but it's not really. There's not a complex IDE setup or any complex local environment setup -- so it really is like just pull the branch open your browser, navigate to your website and test the changes.

Have you talked to folks behind prior startups in the space like layervault?

See http://web.archive.org/web/20150424103031/http://layervault.... and https://kellysutton.com/2015/07/21/startup-theory-of-relativ...

Oof, sounds ominous. I have not heard of them, so it's hard for me to know where they stumbled or draw comparisons to what we've made.

To their point though, I largely agree with this, "The only thing I’ve found to be effective at dealing with competitors in early stage companies is to ignore them."

Did you ever get a chance to use their product?

This is something that really motivates me about offline first/OSS stuff though. It will be inconvenient for those who adopt if we have to shutdown but it's still possible to use floro without needing our servers. You will end up having to host your own though.

> Did you ever get a chance to use their product?

I wasn't a professional designer so never had a need for layervault, but it had quite a bit of polish for its time.

Another app in the space has been https://kaleidoscope.app/ (Mac only) which is still around but doesn't market specifically to just images, I think the parent company has changed hands (was owned by Black Pixel, then Letter Opener GmbH, now owned by Leitmotif)

I like the "I'm not a software engineer" checkbox on the about page that changes the page content.

Great idea, but it seems more complicated than simply adding files to a git repo.

It for sure is more complicated than adding files to a git repo. You are 100% right and I wouldn't dispute that for even a second. I'm not exactly advocating this for solo-projects unless you are already sure you want to do something like internationalize your project.

There are many problems where plain-text falls apart for even engineers though or there's some benefit to editing something through a UI or WYSIWYG rather than plain-text. If you're cool with markdown and editing SVG files manually -- do it.

The problem being addressed is when you have team members who need to do things that requires some level of type-safety but they either don't have the technical background to work with something like git or it would be non-sensical to resolve the conflicts in plain-text. The idea here is for designers to basically take control of things like icons and theming and for translators to take control of i18n. Their work is state that can be used to generate a type-safe API for engineers to consume those assets.

Why does the main product page attempt to connect to a localhost port? It looks like it's trying to hit a socket.io port, but that seems pretty unnecessary for a landing page?

It's testing to see if the daemon is running from the electron app. It uses the connection to the browser for things like sign in and verification and for being able to redirect links into the electron app.

https://github.com/florophore/floro-mono/blob/main/packages/...

The reason it's happening on the landing page is because we use floro for editing the site and testing our changes offline first before pushing.

One of struggles we had at Microsoft is versioning power bi pbix files. Someone publishes a change and the old version is gone unless they saved it somewhere else.

Pretty cool. What framework/tech did you use for the multiplatform app? Curious for a future side project I may start on soon.

Hey Thanks!

Just electron & vite. I might actually migrate off electron, Tauri (https://tauri.app/) seems to be getting more stable and it's gotten great reviews.

I think this is the boilerplate I used though https://github.com/cawa-93/vite-electron-builder.

Thanks! Tauri seems great, and there are a couple other options I was discussing with someone else recently too [1]. Trying to get handle on what's mature enough these days for a multi-platform app.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39852167#39855002

Well happy to share the edges I ran into if you want. Feel free to reach out (email in bio).

Thanks! I'm hoping to use Tauri or Dioxus if possible, just not sure if mature enough. Gotta figure out the data model first, which is independent of that choice, so not in a big rush to choose right now.

Plastic SCM was acquired by Unity so I guess there's precedent.

Show HN: Floro – Visual Version Control