waylan
February 9, 2023, 6:46pm
5
So long as you are writing in a plain text format (such as Markdown), Git works well. However, there are some limitations to be aware of. Here are some excerpts from my comment in a previous discussion about this:
Git tracks changes by line, not by word (ex: line 42 changed). This can be a problem in Markdown if you use soft wrapping. In other words, if you type your paragraph as one long line of text and allow your editor to soft wrap the text in its viewport, git will simply tell you that there was some change in this paragraph and you will still need to figure out what that change is. On the other hand, if you use hard wrapping (inserting hard line breaks at the end of each line), then git is much more useful. As it turns out, any good code editor will include tools for hard wrapping lines. However, everyone who edits your documents must use those tools for it to work well. And I haven’t seen those tools in Markdown (only) editors.
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As I understand it, there are some addons to git which can show changes per word, etc., but they are not built in and you would need a tool which supports them. That would significantly limit which tools you can use.
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Despite all of the above, I personally use and prefer git. But then I’m using it for my code projects and use Markdown to write the (technical) documentation for them.
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