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Ask HN: Change Control for Non-Coders

3 points by SentinelLdnma ↗ HN
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.

7 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 36.3 ms ] thread
scastiel
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
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
Git has plenty of open source GUIs that would help.
thorin
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
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
Didn't know gdocs had history, thanks for the pointer.
solardev
The "suggest changes" mode is also really nice, for multiplayer documents