I would love to see this feature implemented. What would be really cool (but not absolutely necessary) is if it were git-based: easy export by simply cloning the “repo”, committing snapshots in time along with comments, github backups, diffs showing exactly which points/notes/bullets have changed, etc.
Our versioning system is pretty similar to git, in the sense that we do “rebase” as well. But unfortunately I don’t think we’ll change our versioning system to use git.
I think two big use cases that are covered by revision history but not email to self or automated backups are:
(1) Some people want to revert back to a state with one-click, rather than looking and comparing himself.
(2) It’s exponentially to recover data for very frequently edited documents that change a ton during a day (e.g. a team document that gets edited by 10s of people).
Revision history is the in-app way to recover, while automated backups give more peace of mind that if Dynalist somehow goes down or dies or production data is erased (I surely hope those don’t happen but it has happened to Amazon recently so who knows), you still own your data in plain text and OPML format.
They are pretty different in nature, and split screen would be a lot harder to implement than revision history, so it wouldn’t make sense for revision history to depend on split screen. And people coming from other apps would have expectations about how the revision history feature would work, so we’ll most likely stick to that.
Since this is currently in progress, I would love to comment on my support for this, as it is extremely useful for publicly accessible documents and collaboration projects. In case something is messed up or someone with malicious intent deletes everything, it’s good to have a backup and see what subtle changes have been made. Thanks in advance for this feature.