Best of Version Control — April 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of itsfossIt's Foss·7w

    Git Isn’t Just for Developers. It Might Be the Best Writing Tool Ever

    A novelist and writer argues that Git and plain text are the ideal tools for managing creative writing, not just code. Drawing from a near-disaster when a colleague lost her manuscript on a USB drive, the author describes a six-year journey migrating all writing to plain text files in a Git mono-repo. Git's commit history becomes a 'time machine' documenting the evolution of creative work, while plain text ensures longevity and portability across decades. The piece frames this as a political stance against platform lock-in, AI scraping, and the fragility of proprietary cloud tools, advocating for self-hosted, version-controlled, openly licensed writing studios designed to outlive their creators.

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    Article
    Avatar of minersThe Miners·6w

    Jujutsu (JJ): An Alternative to Git? Jujutsu proposes to be simpler yet more powerful than Git. But is it worth switching? Let's find out.

    Jujutsu (JJ) is a version control tool that uses Git repositories as its storage layer while offering a simpler, more flexible workflow. Key differences from Git include no staging area (changes are automatically tracked), conflicts stored in commits for later resolution, automatic rebasing of descendant commits, and a focus on 'changes' rather than branches. The post walks through practical JJ commands including jj git init, jj describe, jj new, jj squash, jj abandon, and jj log, while introducing concepts like change ids vs commit ids, revsets, the Squash Workflow, and the Edit Workflow. The VisualJJ VSCode extension is also recommended for visualizing change history.

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    Article
    Avatar of lwnLWN.net·5w

    Git 2.54.0 released

    Git 2.54.0 has been released by maintainer Junio Hamano. This release includes contributions from 137 people, 66 of whom are first-time contributors. Notable changes include the addition of Git history rewriting functionality and mobile-friendly improvements to gitweb, Git's web interface. Hamano announced he will be taking a couple of weeks offline following the release, with no designated interim maintainer but trusting the community to self-organize.

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    Article
    Avatar of mitsuhikoArmin Ronacher·4w

    Before GitHub

    A personal reflection on the evolution of open source hosting from self-managed Subversion/Trac setups and SourceForge, through Bitbucket, to GitHub's dominance. GitHub transformed open source by removing friction from publishing and contributing, accidentally becoming a critical archive and trust layer for the entire software supply chain. Now, with GitHub showing signs of decline — leadership vacuum, AI noise, product churn — notable projects are migrating to alternatives like Codeberg. The author argues that decentralization may restore autonomy but risks losing the social context (issues, discussions, release history) that GitHub preserved. The core call to action: the open source community needs a publicly funded, endowment-backed archive that preserves source code, release artifacts, and project context independent of any single company's business model.

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