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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
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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!