tools - What's the best version control system for a book writer?

I'm a writer—no programming, only prose in text files, mostly in Emacs org-mode, some in markdown-mode.

I want to implement a version control system for my writing projects.

I work with two types of text files:

1. drafts (textfile-v1.org, textfile-v2.org, etc)


2. research files (research-notes.org)

The latter, the research files, consist of hunks of text I have copy and pasted from the web. My workflow for the research files involves going through those files and deleting as I go. In other words, when I find a quote, I might copy it into a draft file, then delete the quote. This is my way of knowing what I have already processed or not. So that by the time my research file is blank, I know I'm done. When the research file is blank, I delete it so I know I'm done.

For both these uses—writing multiple drafts, and destroying research files as I go—it strikes me that having a version control system would be helpful.

I am NOT doing different branches as I go—just going forward as I make progress writing my book.

I'm using Aquamacs Emacs on OSX. Which version control system would you recommend, and how would I go about integrating it with my Emacs workflow?

Answer

There are a large number of version control systems out there, but I think that Git might be the best choice for you for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is that everything is in a single folder, you don't have to check things out to work on them or rebuild anything. You can just keep a full live copy on a pendrive and it just works. You also don't need to set up servers or magic paths.

In addition, you don't have to check anything out, you just commit it when you're done. You can also keep an offsite repository with very little work so you have that extra layer of protection. Another upshot of git is you can just backup the whole thing by just copying the root folder. Everything is copied over and will work just fine at it's new location.

I can't speak of how to integrate it into Emacs, but I suspect that part of the question can easy be answered at one of the other SE sites.