I've always wanted to see a book that describes git for the common man and gives them tons of examples for how to use it to do productive things.

Even for a small office, git can be immensely useful. Entire production line workflows can be implemented with git .. if only folks would learn to use it productively.

Its not just for development. Writers can use it productively. Accountants too.

It always kind of irks me that Git hasn't just been folded into the OS front-end UI by any of the OS vendors .. it'd be so revolutionary to give common folks an easy way to manage the timeline/history of their computer use using git.

The thing is that change tracking and sometimes even full-on version control are actually integrated with a lot of the tools that people use, like your document editor. The incremental benefit of git then would largely not be automatic version tracking but only the interactive history browsing which git itself is kinda meh at (and is of questionable value for a lot of workflows). And the cost of this transition is forcing people to use a different tool from their regular workflow, one that wants to be used in an environment they're not comfortable in, and also one that is not conducive to handling anything other than plain text.

Rather, programmers should learn from how other software handles version control and incorporate those ideas into git instead. For example, perhaps we should automatically create a commit every time we build the project so that we can roll back or forward to previous builds and not rely on the programmer to remember to make commits so frequently.

The obvious reason is that most file formats used by writers, accountants, etc. are binary files which do not very much benefit from git.

Microsoft Office files are zipped XML these days, there's a standard and everything.

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So? Doesn't matter. Git in that case still provides valuable historical archiving and versioning that is still more useful than the option, without it.

Plus, its chicken and egg. If the OS had a great interface to Git as part of its responsibilities in the Explorer/Finder interface, folks would be more inclined to use text-based file format standards that are coherent with the Git methodology.