Ask HN: Change Control for Non-Coders

3 points by SentinelLdnma 3 years ago | 7 comments

Formerly a writer of code, exploring writing prose.

Is there a diff tool that can track changes better than MS Word "Track Changes" but not as complex as git?

Plain text with possibly markdown. Local or cloud.

scastiel 3 years ago |

I was looking for such a tool (I use Markdown), but in the end I kept using Git. It turns out it’s also pretty good for non-code content :)

SentinelLdnma 3 years ago | |

Agreed. But I need non-coder noobs to also use it (i.e., an Editor, fellow writers without dev background).

I suppose I could write them something with big easy buttons that only performs the actions they need.

ausudhz 3 years ago | | |

Git has plenty of open source GUIs that would help.

thorin 3 years ago |

The main reason that track changes is so horrendous to work with is that MS formatting is a lot more complex that ascii. It does kind of work, if you are strict about the kinds of changes you make and start from a fairly fixed template. Some kind of markdown would be better but even that gives complexity which just isn't there with code.

solardev 3 years ago |

The Google Docs revision history is pretty nice and a lot easier to work with then either Git or Word.

Also MediaWiki might be another option. Janky though compared to gdocs

SentinelLdnma 3 years ago | |

Didn't know gdocs had history, thanks for the pointer.

solardev 3 years ago | | |

The "suggest changes" mode is also really nice, for multiplayer documents