

Version Control for Writers - albertsun
http://lifehacker.com/5232049/flashbake-automates-version-control-for-nerdy-writers

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abhikshah
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.

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

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crocowhile
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.

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wccrawford
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.

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crocowhile
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.

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__david__
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?

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gchpaco
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.

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__david__
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...

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electromagnetic
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.

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ljegou
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 :)

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jpr
AFAICT, free Github repositories are always public.

