Version Control for Writers

Not sure I understand the target audience for this. If you're writing in text files instead of Word and are comfortable working in the terminal, wouldn't you also be comfortable with a Git GUI? What would be cool is if there were plugins that could show diffs for non-text files like Word.

I don't know anyone who would ever write a manuscript as collection of text files. This is non sense.<p>For a book you may use one file per chapter, for an article a unique file - always in a formatting word processor. Sure, it would be nice to have a version control system working transparently withing the word processor, namely recognizing changes paragraph by paragraph.

Interesting, but I'm completely baffled by the plugins. Why do I want the current weather and my last few twitter messages in my commit log? Isn't that completely irrelevant to what I'm committing?

Being a writer, I don't see a point in this. When I was writing reviews, multiple files would have made it a clogged mess and to actually write efficiently there wasn't much time to be changing things up. If it wasn't close enough that the editor would fix it, then the entire thing would be redone.<p>While I'm writing short stories I'd get the same problem. A few thousand words is easier to edit by mind than version control would be. For a novel I see the use in chapter control, but I fail to see how useful it really would be as a novel isn't a series of unconnected events that can be seamlessly changed without huge catastrophic changes to the entire piece.

I love the idea of automatic secure saves for my writings. I can use flashbake instead of dropbox. But i'd like to have a clear understanding of GitHub free plans caveats, especially about privacy of the repos :)