Squashing page edit commits

[Boboassa]

Hi, first of all thanks for this awesome tool, I just started a simple personal wiki and, for me, OtterWiki strikes the perfect balance between features and simplicity.

When I create a page I quickly add some content and progressively refine the wording, formatting, and more informations. But this results in a whole bunch of commits that crowd the "History" page.

How can I go about squashing some of those together?

It's a minor problem but if there's an easy way to do it it could improve my workflow.

Thanks in advance 🦦

[Almeus]

In git I believe there's a way to mark a change as an amendment so it gets lumped into the previous commit. Other wikis like DokuWiki and MediaWiki have a "this is a minor change" checkbox when editing. Having such a checkbox to mark a change as an amendment seems intuitive to me.

Alternatively, I could see an automatic system where if you edit within a certain window and under a certain byte count it assumes you're tweaking things. I do a lot of minor tweaking. Sure you're supposed to use the preview button but my brain acts differently before vs after clicking submit.

[Boboassa]

Yeah, since my use-case is documenting what I do instead of writing fully fledged documentation, I was taking notes directly on otterwiki, so frequent changes were necessary, I think I'll change my approach to taking notes somewhere else and adding them to OW only when complete, thanks for the reply.

The feature to set as a minor change could be useful, maybe outside the scope of Otterwiki though since it's mostly about simplicity and the current system works quite well as-is.

[redimp]

Hey @Boboassa, thanks for raising this!

I totally get it—a tidy history is something I prefer too. Git actually supports git rebase, which goes beyond what @Almeus suggested; you can use it to interactively reorganize commits, squash them, and rewrite messages.

Building that feature into An Otter Wiki would be pretty complicated, so I unfortunately can't promise it will be on my todo list soon.

If you want to do it yourself, just run git rebase -i [...] in the repository (either inside the container or locally). Make sure to back up before you start!

[Boboassa]

Thanks, I'll try the git rebase method, I just wanted to be sure that it's fine to edit the content repository without breaking things in otterwiki, if nothing bad happens it's not a problem for me to ssh into the server and do a little cleaning up if the history of a page is really messed up.

If it's long to implement it's not a problem, as I said, I also think this is out of the scope of otterwiki.

Thanks for the replay and for this awsome tool :)

[redimp]

I just wanted to be sure that it's fine to edit the content repository without breaking things in otterwiki

I'm very happy about the decision to use "plain git" as backend for An Otter Wiki. That makes life much easier.