GitLab B.V. CEO here. Lots of people use GitLab as the infrastructure to write books. Examples are PenFlip.com (using thier fork of GitLab) and all authoring for O'Reilly Media (their Atlas platform is the frontend.
Is this new to anyone? I have been using bit-bucket for writing a book for a couple of months. I figured this is pretty common. The Markdown language is great for writing technical material.
Gregory Gershwin here. I've seen a few people use version control for technical books, but I haven't seen much for fiction yet. And for young adult fiction, I think the examples are slim to none. I'm hoping that opening this works encourages people to think about other ways of writing/telling stories.
>> Right, wonderful, we could see how your story developed, if you had used line wrapping in your text editor. As is this diff is not at all informative.
It seems like an interesting question: which would be the ideal unit for diffing? For software we just use the line of code, but for prose perhaps it would be by sentence? Should the VCS notice when sentences are transposed? It seems there could be more tool development in this area...
Github can do better with word highlighting [0]. However, I checked a few of my own commits and this seems to be unreliable. I very rarely view diffs on Github, so I do not really care. Maybe someone who uses it more ca comment how good the word highlighting works.
What the hell, I scrolled down and got a football article instead. What kind of insane new design thing is that?
I've noticed a few online publications do this lately. They basically attach additional, recently-published articles in an endless feed as you scroll down to keep you on the site longer (similar to Pinterest/Facebook feed/Twitter).