[jandinter]

> “Git for everything“ would be a multi-billion dollar startup easily.

Worked on a “Git for Word” project [1], which is currently on hold.

The diff part was manageable, though not trivial to get diffs that make sense for prose/regular text.

The hard parts are UX/UI (making Git concepts transparent to “normal” users) and merging. Yet without automatic merging, branching is not very convenient.

Would love to collaborate on this in the future again. Reach out if you are working in this space, happy to share.

[1] https://julesdocs.com

[koolba]

I’ve had better than expected success with diffing word files by converting them to markdown via pan doc. It’s nowhere near perfect as you lose nearly all formatting, but if only the actual text content is changing it allows you to automate the display of those changes.

[willis936]

I don't think merging will ever be fully solved by software. It's a problem created and solved by process. How annoying merges are is entirely dictated by process.

Sourcetree is the best git GUI I've used. That could be used as a model.

I think an old-style solution to merging would be fine: output a word file that uses a unique font style to indicate which user made what conflicting changes, have the user edit the document and remove all of the "merge styles", then continue.