My solution for this feature is to simply snapshot the directory where I keep my notes every hour into a git repository. This gives me some change history, but it does not record every keystroke. The cron job is the following shell script:

SOURCE=/home/corion/bin/App-notes-htmx/notes_corion
TARGET=/home/corion/backup/notes_corion_history
if git --git-dir=$TARGET --work-tree $SOURCE diff --quiet; then
    git --git-dir=$TARGET --work-tree $SOURCE add  --all
    git --git-dir=$TARGET --work-tree $SOURCE commit -m "Hourly"
fi

I've "implemented" the tool as a shell script, but if I add more features, I will likely move it to Perl and use Git::Raw to do the adding/filtering/pruning myself. But then I would lose the convenience of .gitignore for example.

I still have on my list some kind of git history-prune, that coalesces adjacent git commits if they are too close, just to eliminate changes that don't matter anymore. Maybe after a month, compress all commits older than one month and less than 24 hours apart into a single commit.

I think having all changes of a single day in one commit is a sensible granularity for my use case.

Tags: tools