: Re: How should a writer use version control to track drafts, rewrites, and revisions? I'm a writer, not a programmer. I'm just now for the first time learning about version control and how it works,

@Kristi637

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I do not know whether the sophisticated functionality of git would be all that useful, unless perhaps if you are collaborating with another writer. However git does offer a couple of things that are potentially interesting or useful to the writer.

The first, and somewhat trivially, is that it neatly does the book-keeping versions of your text for you, without bothering you about which names are which, or wondering if you are editing the correct version. So you could just stay on your master branch, commit your changes daily, but always deal with files like Chapter01.md. Its versioning without the clutter.

More intriguingly perhaps, is that when you commit, you are invited to add a comment describing the commit. Programmers use it to indicate the nature of the change being made (e.g. 'Fix one-off indexing error'), but more pertinent to the writer might be a reflection on what was written, a sort of writer's diary that you keep as you go along.

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