Except the first step is "install git". :-)

I don't know git, so I can't comment further than that. I suppose part of my point is, "revision control can be useful to these people" - beyond that it doesn't really matter *which* revision control system you're using, so go with what you're comfortable with. I happened to write it about subversion for no stronger reason than because that's what I happen to use, albeit not with a local-file-system repository as described in the article, as I use multiple machines and also want prereaders/proofers to have read-access to the repository.

But your comment does nicely illustrate a point that came up in the ongoing discussion on the forum about possibly integrating subversion into WriteRoom. You're going to get people wanting cvs or git or... the pain would never stop. ;-)

I think (and actually hope) that the consensus is not to integrate or embed it at all. WriteRoom is really just a text editor with a specialised user interface. It has no 'awareness' of projects, just single files. Revision control should, IMHO, be absolutely external to that.

+1 for Git

There have been countless prototypes, drafts, experiments, etc. that I talked myself out of storing in SVN. The conversation typically went something like so: “Do I really want to create a new repository just for this experiment? Should it go in my local repo, or does it belong up on the shared repo? Should I bother setting up the standard dirs for trunk, tags, and branches? Maybe I should just add it to a grab-bag repo for now? Nah. Forget it. It’s not worth the trouble yet.”

Git removes that argument altogether.

More thoughts on that topic here...

http://jasonrudolph.com/blog/2008/04/22/git-init-say-hello-to-agility/

I know about the GUI front ends. I demonstrate the usage of SCPlugin in the howto. I only mentioned RapidSVN briefly because I don't use it myself. It's a clear stub of a section that's waiting to be expanded though, especially as it's multiplatform. (And as a price for that some of its Mac user interface work is a bit scrappy-looking.)

However, with neither of those can you *create* a new repository. There's a menu option for it in RapidSVN but if you click on it you just get a dialogue saying you need to open a terminal and use svnadmin create... :-)

JamieD: Hm. I've not noticed any - well, noticeable slow-down with SCPlugin (and I would). Then again I'm running a version from 20 Dec 2007, so maybe it's newer than yours. ;-)

The only peeve I have isn't the developers' fault: With the advent of Leopard, the whole thing is shoved into a "More" submenu off the Finder contextual menu. Minor annoyance though. More than half the time I keep a Terminal open and use svn directly anyway. :-)

Google Docs is for the casual, easy-as-possible crowd. Subversion (although I would recommend Git over it) provides a hell of a lot more control and management of any type of coding, or in this case writing, project.

Version control software allows commits, and highly organized distributions of code/writing to many people efficiently, and without the fear of losing everything in a hard-drive failure, etc.

I guess for the casual user, this doesn't seem to make a difference for your needs, but from a programmers perspective, it's probably a hell of a lot easier to implement something that you use much during coding projects.

The article was written for a casual user who just wants to save revisions of his writing. With that in mind, google docs works just as well and with a lot less setup. Admittedly, you don't have to be online with svn since the article creates an svn repository on the local machine, whereas that's not an option with google docs (at least until it starts working with google gears).

I'm not dissing the article, it's clever and something I might try myself, as I already have access to an svn repository.

I didn't mention the TextMate subversion integration for three reasons:

1: I'd forgotten about it. :-) I knew it was there but never got into the habit of using it.

2: I wanted to describe a solution that was editor-agnostic, not least because:

3: This was written (in only about 2-3 hours) in response to a thread in the WriteRoom forums, and the link only posted - by me - there. It would be rude to basically imply "you need to switch to TextMate" - itself another pay-for editor.

I switched to TextMate during the article, as I said in the article, because it was the sort of thing that's easier done there. It also demonstrates the editor-agnosticism. :-) Certainly if you do use a heterogenous writing environment it's a valid thing to do, but then in that case you're probably not my target audience. :-)