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How to Use Git to Manage Your Writing Project

Brian P. Hogan on September 23, 2019

Introduction Version control isn’t just for code. It’s for anything you want to track, including content. Using Git to manage your next ...
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Jimmy Utterström • Edited

Great beginner friendly post! It might be a good idea to share it outside DEV to reach non programmers as well. 🙂

It made me wonder if there's any GUI based application or service for writing books and articles that's using git and Markdown in the background for VC and formatting. Feels like a quite good fit for managing versioned text-focused content. Or I guess that's maybe Gitbook.com I'm describing 😛

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dennislwm

I use Clarify It and it’s great for writing help files and tutorial articles. You can save it as a clarify document, but export it to PDF, Markdown, or HTML.

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Brian P. Hogan

Clarify is fantastic, but they stopped maintaining it and have moved on to a different business-focused product (clarify-it.com/blog/the-future-of-...). And if you're on macOS it won't work on the latest OS since they never made a 64-bit app. I really hope someone writes a new version of that tool because it is indeed fantastic.

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Daniel Coturel

Hi! If there is such a tool, I'm interested in knowing it!

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Jimmy Utterström

I believe the closest you get might be gitbook.com. But personally I believe it feels a bit too focused on technical documentation. I'd like to see something with a cleaner and slightly different UI and an application structure that's aimed towards more general writing and not only digital content. I don't know of anything like that though.

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Andy Lamb

There's also leanpub.com/
Although they focus more on publishing, they do support an online editor.

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Steven G. Harms

Hi there! We manage the software engineering and data science curricula at The Flatiron School (README and TDD-oriented "labs") using a slightly more rigid version of this process (thousands of repos). In terms of backup and PRs to drive discussion, I simply can't imagine a better "porcelain" tool than Git.

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Nazim Boudeffa • Edited

Thank you for this entry I am working on a site entirely made with articles and that uses markdown github.com/nazimboudeffa/codeurdejeux

We use a node package named showdown to make the articles as an html page

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Geoff Fellows

Next step is a remote repository so that you don't lose your work. I was speaking to a person that had done fifty-six thousand words. Their laptop hard disk completely failed. Now they print on paper every completed page.

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J. Jordan Stivers

I push my fiction novel drafts to github daily and have done so for years. I write in markdown in Visual Code Studio and I've been wanting to help my writing friends take advantage of github for their projects for years. Great tutorial that I'll be sure to pass along. Knowing my work is up on there instead of just on my computer brings me SO much peace.

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Skattspa

Best article top down organised i read in the year! Congrats!
Going to super simple sttufs to more complex. You made me learn!Thx