7
For those of you that use version control, what do you use to edit your documents?
(piefed.blahaj.zone)
this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
7 points (100.0% liked)
Writing
2210 readers
1 users here now
A specific community for original shortform and longform writing, stories, worldbuilding, and other stuff of that nature.
Subcommunity of Creative
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You could set up a script to automatically commit changes (if present) every X minutes. That way you would generate automatic document history without having to care the commit comments. Git is mighty versatile, but you don't have to use all of its features.
I like using commit messages as a a little built-in editor's log; I'm hopeful that in time I'll be able to review the history on a particular poem and see something interesting about the types of edits or editorial choices I make over time. I have a really hard time writing good commit messages for poetry as opposed to code, a lot of the times it's "changed word choice in XXX" or something like that but I want to improve on that. Not really sure what a "good" poetry commit message is but I figure I'll know it when I see it. Or maybe I'll just see a natural trend as my writing matures. But now that the poems are in git, git is part of the medium and the commits are part of the art, and I want to be thoughtful about them. I've always wanted to see the commit history for novels I've read and, if I ever publish my own work (and if I'm brave enough) I want to publish my git repo alongside the finished work.
Interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing them. I assumed that you would want to have file versioning out of the way and focus on the writing. What about keeping a sort of change log (diary, if you want) as part of the document itself, like an appendix? That way you could maybe separate raw document history from the creative process.
Git is a technical tool intended for versioning sharing, manipulating and comparing pieces of code. I'm not sure that you need all those aspects for literary work. I imagine that writing a poem is more linear in the sense that you won't merge a poem branch back to the "main" version of the poem. At least not in the way you would do it with code. You will also probably not submit or accept patches to the poem. So maybe the commit messages are not necessarily the best place to keep "creative metadata" about the content.
Just some random thoughts. I guess that you'll have to try and see what method fits your creative process best (the natural trend you mentioned). Good luck!