alt Hacker NewsI can't remember who suggested it, but I'm sold on the idea that if you're committing your drafts to version control, then you should break your lines at syntactic points: at the end of a short sentence, or at the ends of the component phrases of a longer sentence. This should typically lead to a cleaner and more readily comprehensible version history.
Of course, this assumes that you're writing in Markdown or ASCIIDoc or something else that will get processed into the final displayed form. But even with plain text, you could always run it through fmt or something similar.
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> I'm sold on the idea that if you're committing your drafts to version control, then you should break your lines at syntactic points: at the end of a short sentence, or at the ends of the component phrases of a longer sentence. This should typically lead to a cleaner and more readily comprehensible version history.
What you're describing is called "track changes" in word processors.
I'd say an alternative to using Git or JJ or whatever is use a version control that exists to serve non-code. That is to say, use Track Changes! :D
Word, Google Docs, Scrivener (this is my favorite), etc. have no problem telling you "hey you changed this draft by inserting a paragraph and changing this other word's verb ending, while also replacing this one with a synonym."
Yeah, if you use Git, which was designed for tracking changes to a far more limited kind of language, you're going to run into incompatibilities. So track changes with a version control created for tracking changes to human language.
If you have to "rethink" your app in order to serve a new purpose, it's a red flag that you're trying to square a circle.
Better to use a tool that was created for your purpose.
Personally, I just change the diff engine to use difftastic, which can handle diff's on a syntactic level. Works great.
You could also just change git's diff settings to highlight word-based changes if you don't want to use external tools. I believe you can even use regex to redefine a word to match sentences.