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Comment by MontyCarloHall | Hacker News Reader

The author’s use of Git versus Google Docs’ version history (which I find is excellent for tracking and annotating collaborative changes across a document) hinges on his claim that GDocs history is too complicated. He does not substantiate this claim; indeed, his use of Git seems extremely convoluted and complicated relative to GDocs.

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However, using GDocs version history requires discovering it and understanding that it exists and not using anything else to do the job.

That sounds stupid until you start working at a company where "oh yeah we version this specification" means there is a Google Doc Word document in which each "change" consists of

- picking a color

- adding new things in text of that color

- using strike-through to cross out things which are no longer valid

, as opposed to using the document's version history as version history.

I can say that when you’re trying to compare versions gdocs and word are a little more difficult to use compared to how GitHub (or git) presents the diff.

How so? GDocs’ diff presentation looks great to me: https://images.ctfassets.net/lzny33ho1g45/2t3YHSACJY4iGfxWYL...

In fact, it does one better than GitHub by showing edits by different users in different colors.

Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32630551, this is a about a very specific scenario which GitHub happens to handle out-of-the-box (but awkwardly), and which GDoc doesn't (but perhaps could with scripting).

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