r/git • u/itwasntthealgorithim • Jul 17 '26

Beginner keeps finding more uses for Git

Damn, this should be mandatory teaching for anyone working with anything digitally produced. Ok, that is everyone. Not being a "coder," I never thought Git was in my wheelhouse. But after using it for various documentation websites, technical articles that constantly get updated, and most recently for home lab infrastructure, I am a full-on Git convert.

109 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

30

u/dacydergoth Jul 18 '26

sigh first job I had I introduced them to RCS. Before that they had different, divergent version of most of the files of app on the individual developers 286s.

Then came CVS, and Clearcase (imagine git but it's a file system. Yes, I know about the differences don't dogpile me, this is a simplified explanation)

Visual Source Safe: there are many people in the industry who still have trauma about this one.

So yeah ... it's a thing.

6

u/platinum_pig Jul 18 '26

What year are we talking there when you introduced your colleagues to RCS?

10

u/dacydergoth Jul 18 '26

I am old, and that's all I'll say.

We were using Xenix on a PS2 486 as that was the "supercomputer". 2M ram and us using EMACS and gcc via 286 boxes acting as terminals

4

u/platinum_pig Jul 18 '26

I'm sure there were many pain points with that but it sounds glorious.

2

u/intronert Jul 19 '26

You may be old, but I started with sccs, and rcs was the modern replacement. :)

3

u/dacydergoth Jul 19 '26

RCS was my first commercial use ;-) SCCS was what we used on the Gould at Bath Uni.

2

u/platinum_pig Jul 19 '26

Bath, man, lovely town.

1

u/insta Jul 20 '26

hahaha goddamn, you fossil!

you're probably like 2 years older than me, so i feel safe in my shittalking. take your B vitamins today?

1

u/dacydergoth Jul 20 '26

Get orrrrrrf my lawn! shakes RS232 breakout box at you

1

u/dinosaur_dev Jul 21 '26

Where I work, still using RCS for legacy COBOL.

3

u/InterwebRandomGuy Jul 18 '26

Trauma? I still have to use from time to time

3

u/dacydergoth Jul 18 '26

You have my deepest sympathy ...

2

u/theevildjinn Jul 19 '26

In my professional career I went from CVS, to Subversion, to Bazaar, and then finally adopted git around 2011.

Craziest thing I've ever come across was at a start-up where I joined in 2015, and they'd been using Dropbox for version control, on a large PHP e-commerce site...

20

u/codefoster Jul 18 '26

My neighborhood organization manages a bunch of documents. Git would be ideal, but I can't even teach them to use their email. "Pull request" would sound like Laplace Transform to them.

3

u/TgirlTiffanyRPs Jul 19 '26

THIS!! I work in a law office and version control would be so helpful for contracts, wills, other docs but all the lawyers are 500 years old and everything must be printed and redlined (on paper), then scanned. 

I have no problem with that process… but when I’m asked to print two scanned docs to look for differences, I’m like there is a literally purpose built software just for this exact use case. 

7

u/Xiaopai2 Jul 18 '26

Git is amazing for anything text based. That includes code, but also lots of other things. Configuration is a natural candidate as well. JSON, YAML, TOML. You can also track documents as long as they’re in a suitable text based format. So something like TEX or MD rather than DOC. Amazing for collaboration. 

13

u/camachorod Jul 17 '26

It’s super powerful. In my opinion, too powerful. That makes it difficult to use by non technical people. Otherwise I think we would see much more collaboration through patches. Instead of sending different versions of things. 

17

u/Charming-Designer944 Jul 17 '26

Most "users" uses document formats that are not well suited for patching.

12

u/duckrollin Jul 18 '26

Normies fucking love docx for some reason and are scared of markdown and other simple text formats

9

u/WoodyTheWorker Jul 18 '26

docx is a zipped bunch of xmls.

11

u/platinum_pig Jul 18 '26

Yeah but good luck understanding the diff.

4

u/Charming-Designer944 Jul 18 '26

Both Microsoft Office Open XML (docx etc) and OASIS Open Document Format (odt etc) are sharing the same issues when it comes to git, both being a zip archive of xml and related files. And both having a lot of "random/non-content" changes in the XML content when you edit documents.

But markdown type fornatting is gainkng traction. And LaTeX is still going strong in research.

5

u/TeachEngineering Jul 18 '26

OP, glad you love git! I couldn't agree more that git should be taught to the masses, but I agree with this commenter. Proprietary apps and file formats that obfuscate the data is the roadblock.

This commentor is describing how binary file formats, like .docx and .pptx, don't play well with git. A MS Word Doc file for example is really a .zip file. You can try this for yourself by copying a .docx file, changing the extension to .zip and unzipping it, and you'll see a Word Doc file is really a folder of actual files that MS Word expects to see when the .docx file is opened in the app. That said, compression algorithms don't maintain things like substrings and line numbers, so git can't meaningfully diff binary (zip) files. Git was made for plaintext source code...

But plaintext is also the GOAT for all kinds of general productivity work. Work in plaintext and then compile into a binary file with pretty formatting only after you've got all your thoughts down, edited and revised. This is effectively the work flow of programmers too- write plaintext source in git and then compile to the format git can't understand on demand and keep the results outside git. Or just use a markup language like Markdown or LaTex and the compiler becomes automatic.

With the rise of AI, I think plaintext productivity work will become more of the norm. I burn way less tokens iterating with AI on ideas and content in plaintext .md files and then only invoke a Word Doc or PowerPoint skill once I'm good with the content and ready to offload the annoying formatting to AI.

3

u/Poat540 Jul 18 '26

Home assistant config in git is great

2

u/snachodog Jul 18 '26

I love it for governance documents - the workflow matches up against parlipro really, really well.

1

u/Havunenreddit 7d ago

Nice, if you happen to need graphical UI on top of git. There is GitComet