This is a proof of concept.
A (WIP) tool to turn a git tree into a tutorial. It's like a simple form of literate programming.
The way it works is you simply include markdown in your commit messages that describes the changes in that particular commit. Diffwita then turns it into a lovely document.
Why?
- It's kind of silly.
- Lets tutorials include a single source of truth for both the text of a tutorial and the project the tutorial is building.
- The audience can be sure that if they follow your tutorial, it will build because you can't make a mistake or leave something out when the diff itself constitutes the tutorial.
- Readers can browse the change-log and directly relate the change with the relevant section of the tutorial since the commit message includes the tutorial.
To do:
- automatically build a table of contents, linkify headings, separate into multiple pages.
- create a markdown block that lets you specify where a particular file will appear in the markdown.
- use libgit2 instead of calling out to the system's git install.
- probably should rewrite a bunch of it to take advantage of the templating library I used instead of messing around so much with the markdown processor.
- make links to commit SHAs actually resolve properly.
- syntax highlighting.
Notes:
- You almost certainly want to configure the repository with:
which prevents git from removing your headings;
git config --local commit.cleanup scissors
#is a comment to git by default, and gets removed from your commit messages. - If you want to create a section in your document with only text but no code
changes, the command you need is:
git commit --allow-empty