Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewDucker | Hacker News Reader

What I mostly want, when writing collaborative documents, isn't a git equivalent - it's a code-review equivalent.

I want to leave comments on individual words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., with suggestions for changes. And that's something that git doesn't allow, because the smallest change you can comment on is a file, with no ability to comment on specific parts of it.

View on HN

Git doesn't support it, but GitHub does. You can comment on individual lines via GitHub. I'm going to do something similar - maybe on a more granular level (words/sentences).

It sounds like you're looking for Microsoft Word, which has offered this feature for more than a decade (albeit though not online until this past year).

Latex has line comments and since it is compiled into a document you can place line breaks anywhere. It does break the flow of the sentence though.

I've used Latex+vim+git to write scientific papers recently. It is unfortunately much too complicated for my colleagues to adopt. They're holding onto MS Word which is far inferior in terms of markup, citing, and VCS.

I've been converting my Latex documents to ugly word documents for collaborating and editing. The MS Word editing isn't great either. The strikethrough method breaks up flow. I've also had problems deleting side comments in Libre office. And the MS Word experience isn't always the same on Macs.

You can usually do it with shared Google docs. I know a few writers who share their content with a few trusted betas. It provides the necessary features, I think. Highlights, commenting etc.

I think there is also a "real-time" feature that it provides (not sure about that), so there is usually more than one eye on the doc as the chapter is being typed.

I asked how this could be implemented online 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6284610

I believe Operational Transforms are the way to go, but I have no basis for that.

If you're using google docs for your collaboration this sort of commenting is built in. It's a great feature. Almost better than collaborative editing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com