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Git stores the entire history of text files. Very few apps need the history feature. Leaving the feature in place may take much disk space, and actually removing files no longer needed is a pain in git, git is not designed for that use case.

I do agree that a standardized sync protocol and file format that could be pointed at any arbitrary server would be terrific. I just disagree that git is that format for many use cases.



As a note taker, I’d much rather have the history and deal with the disk space than lose the history and have extra storage.

I almost never truly want to delete any note. And most changes are additive so don’t take much extra storage due to versioning.

I find it maddening to use a note app that doesn’t have detailed change logs and git’s history and blame is really useful.


For notes, of course. I also store my notes in git. But GP mentioned "sync with git" as "a standard app feature", not specific to note apps.


For text based notes, the storage cost is negligible.

I've been using a single git repo to store notes for years. And my entire repo is a few MB.


You just gave me an idea to garbage collect, let's see how much space we can save:

  $ du -sh ~/Notes/
  47M     /home/dotancohen/Notes/
  $ du -sh ~/Notes/.git
  21M     /home/dotancohen/Notes/.git
  $ git -C ~/Notes/.git gc
  $ du -sh ~/Notes/
  44M     /home/dotancohen/Notes/


It might be better to only measure the size of the `.git` folder, as with it you can reproduce everything else.

Essentially, a bare git instance.




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