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Comment by kbar13 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I would like to see out of this project is a better version control system for prose. Git is great for code, but it's not at all any good for editing text.

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+1, in code the basic unit is usually a line, but in prose it is the sentence. I've tried using git with LaTeX and it always ended up with weird situations where you had to put each sentence on a different line to make it work effectively.

I think this could be made easier by using the git database as a substrate - there's nothing in that that's tied to line-oriented files (maybe the compression algorithms make some assumptions?).

It's the diff-viewing infrastructure that needs to be completely replaced for prose.

Perhaps "git diff --word-diff" helps? I don't see a similar option for "git show" though and that seems important :(

I think you're right: if the diff-viewing infrastructure was abstracted (plugin?) it could do this and more (eg word-diff-by-paragraph, image-diff).

Indeed. git diff --color-words will often do the trick for prose, but the real solution is plugging a sentence-oriented diff viewer into git difftool. git difftool is extendable by setting git config variables, so it's very much doable.

Git is actually great for text (code is just text after all), it's just a matter of a better display for the diffs. Might want to have a look at a project I'm working on, Penflip [1], which does exactly this. It uses Git to track changes in markdown files, and has a web interface like GitHub but geared towards writers instead of developers. The in-browser editing interface is a fork of http://prose.io/, which allows for git commits (and other actions) from the browser.

[1] https://www.penflip.com/

That exists, and it's made by a YC alum, Nate Kontny. It's called Draft. https://draftin.com

I’ve heard good things about Draft. But since it’s proprietary it’s not a good fit for people who want to develop and modify the tools they use.

I discussed this with one of the Git maintainers; it seems that the main work needed is a modification of the way text is chunked (into lines), and this chunking is already suitable factored.

Check out http://prose.io/ it might be suitable - its aimed at the CMS end of things though

They really should rewrite their "easy" guide to set up the starter project for prose, it's not clear at all what should be done to get it running.

Harpjs is two steps ahead on this one.

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