When I hear "writer", I think of a screenwriter, novelist, or poet of some sort. "Github for writers" is misleading, since I think the people who would use this wouldn't be writers, but rather technical people who collaboratively write things. This is cool, given its audience is people who write blogs or possibly research papers.
I think you showed this (or the premise of this idea) on HN a month ago or so. It still has the same problems as it does then... IF your core audience is still writers as defined above.
1) Writers write in revisions, and don't like to have every word they change critiqued by their editors/producers/etc.
2) Writers don't like markdown -- they want WYSIWYG. This feature alone makes me feel like your goal was to make this tool for technical people.
3) I think a lot of meaningless changes would get jumbled up in the mix if you're writing something long. If you're writing a novel, it would be nice to go between different versions of the novel, but perhaps a bit too much if you had a commit for every punctuation mark.
This being said, I'm sort of interested what you think your audience should be. I think it could be a good tool given the right circumstances.
Novel writer here (unpublished but I've written several books, writing my next one in a month).
The site looks intriguing but yeah, I agree with your points:
1. I do write in revisions. Smaller changes don't matter as much when it comes to the end product. However, what I WOULD love to see is a previous copy on the right of the screen and a text editor on the left. I tend to do my revisions that way so that I can look at what I wrote, copy/paste what's fine, and rewrite what needs to be rewritten while still looking at the original.
2. After trying out a million "distraction free" writers, I am still on MS Office. It's really worth it for me. I can't stand writing in Libre, or OO, or Ohm, or Monkey (whatever it's called). Scrivener may be the only exception but I usually just port my stuff there.
3. Exactly
Here are the things I do like:
1. chapter by chapter separation of concerns. I like that. Even if it's in the form of text files, it's great.
2. one-click publishing. I really appreciate that. It's a pain to go from Word to a properly formatted PUB file. Having a tool that does this for you from the get-go is awesome. I've spent way too much time reformatting Word to be accepted by Smashwords in the past.
3. Comments. I enjoy this as well. If I had someone to help me out with my book, this would be a great feature. If I was to hire someone to help me out with editing and critiquing my work, I'd use this tool. Definitely would.
With that said, I would abuse the hell out of this for blog writing.
> 2. After trying out a million "distraction free" writers, I am still on MS Office. It's really worth it for me. I can't stand writing in Libre, or OO, or Ohm, or Monkey (whatever it's called). Scrivener may be the only exception but I usually just port my stuff there.
Just curious: Have you tried AbiWord? Arguably it shares a lot of the good parts of its interface with MS word -- If you have I'd love to hear what you (dis)like about it (and how Word is better or just as bad). No affiliation with AbiWord - just curious.
Personally I write too little at present, but when I do write, I write in vim, either in plain text or in some variation of ReStructuredText. I very much prefer to keep writing and formatting separate, starting with an outline of headings+notes, and expanding section by section. I've never attempted anything beyond essay-length, though.
Have you looked at Draft (draftin.com)? It has the side-by-side revisions you mentioned (all your revisions ever, in fact). I'm not sure about the other features you mentioned.
Agreed. At the same time though, it's annoying to have to categorize every change. I think it would be better to maybe split the service between blog writers / screen writers / novel writers, since each would have their own preference. I think novelists would prefer having a versioning system for broad changes rather than tiny ones.. And not have to categorize them.
I think you showed this (or the premise of this idea) on HN a month ago or so. It still has the same problems as it does then... IF your core audience is still writers as defined above.
1) Writers write in revisions, and don't like to have every word they change critiqued by their editors/producers/etc.
2) Writers don't like markdown -- they want WYSIWYG. This feature alone makes me feel like your goal was to make this tool for technical people.
3) I think a lot of meaningless changes would get jumbled up in the mix if you're writing something long. If you're writing a novel, it would be nice to go between different versions of the novel, but perhaps a bit too much if you had a commit for every punctuation mark.
This being said, I'm sort of interested what you think your audience should be. I think it could be a good tool given the right circumstances.